The Joe Rogan Experience - #1678 - Michael Pollan

Episode Date: July 5, 2021

Michael Pollan is an author, professor, and journalist. His newest book, "This is Your Mind on Plants," is available on July 6.

the joe rogan experience train by day joe rogan podcast by night all day all right mr pollen yeah hey see you man good to be here good to be back good to see you again and uh good to see you in the you're done with the headphones huh i'm done with the headphones in and out instantaneously your new book this is your mind on plants yeah right here yeah like it since you've been on I have to say that at all of the people that have discussed psychedelics I think you've been one of the most important ones because you were a respected, esteemed journalist. You're like a real writer already.

And for you to introduce the world of psychedelics to people that maybe would have been skeptical of someone's intentions, like, there's a lot of folks that like, you read something about drugs, and even if it's from someone that has credentials, you sort of assume that they're trying to justify. Yeah. They have an agenda when they're starting out. I think you're right. I think that made a huge difference. I was coming at that world from outside. I'd had very little

experience of psychedelics, virtually none as a kid. I'd heard about this research. I was curious. And I'd heard about this research. I was curious. I was skeptical. And so I went on this journey that brought me into this community. And I think that allowed people to follow me, to come with me. I think people would much rather go on a journey with you than have you lecture at them. Oh, for sure. And so in all my journalism, that's what I try to do.

And so in all my journalism, that's what I try to do. I start out as unknowing or ignorant as the reader and then gradually work my way into the world of whether it's food and agriculture or psychedelics. And so in all my books, I kind of start out like an idiot and gradually move toward a state of knowledge or more knowledge. I think that's incredibly relatable to people because it just lets people know what you're learning, how you're learning it, why you're learning it. And how you come to your conclusions, that it's the result of having these experiences or talking to these people. And they see all the armature of journalism. They see how it works because you're letting them, you know, you're being very transparent about the process. And also, you know, I think that, you know, there are lots of most of the stuff that had been written about psychedelics and most of the stuff I was reading was written from like inside the world already convinced that these were great things that were going to change human consciousness.

And that's a turnoff to people, especially if you have this resistance, which many, many people do. There's so much cultural baggage around psychedelics left over from the 60s. You know, people, the risks, how disruptive it was to society. And people still hold these ideas in their head. People say, well, don't people like jump off of buildings? I mean, I hear these, or doesn't it scramble your chromosomes? These are urban legends by and large, although there were some people who jumped off of buildings. But the chromosome thing was not true.

The staring at the sun until you go blind was not true. But it's amazing the power of these memes and just lingering in our culture. Well, there's a great fear of losing your mind. I mean, you know about the guy from Pink Floyd and people hear about, you know, some guy in the neighborhood that did too much acid. The thing is they are real. Like there are really people that have lost.

Oh yeah, they're casualties. Yeah. And I think we have to acknowledge that. And I think unless we're really frank about the risks, we risk another backlash because bad shit will happen. Yes. You know, if you're trialing, you know, a couple thousand people for depression, which they're doing, these clinical trials to see if psilocybin can help with depression, some of those people are going to commit suicide. That's what depressed people do.

And, you know, especially if you get them off their SSRIs, you know, that increases the risk. off their SSRIs, that increases the risk. But that narrative, when someone in a clinical trial for depression with psychedelics gets out there, it'll plug into this old narrative about people jumping off of buildings. Whereas people routinely commit suicide on SSRIs and it doesn't make the news. So there are these... It's when a story plugs into an existing narrative in the culture that it really takes off. It has this incredible power. And that could happen. So I think we should be – I think the way you inoculate the culture is talking about risk and say there were casualties.

There are people who did – I don't want to say fry their brains because that's pretty imprecise. But people had some psychotic breaks on psychedelics. Would they have had them anyway? There's reason to believe they would. It's not like schizophrenia rates went up during the 60s. Do you think it triggers schizophrenia, though? I think that's probably what happens. Any kind of traumatic experience can do it.

Divorce of parents can do it. If you're at that age and you have that vulnerability, going to graduate school for a certain number of people does it. Extreme stress. And it can be an extreme experience. So there is a good reason that people, even second degree relatives who have schizophrenia, you can't participate in any of these trials. They're screening people. And also for manic depression, they're screening you out. And there are good reasons for that. Yeah. There's this discussion about cannabis that's been going on for a while now of like what happens to people when they, particularly when

they eat edibles. Like is it something that triggers schizophrenia? And I think the numbers, as you're saying, they really do mirror the numbers that just happen in a general population. Like, it's one out of 100. And one out of 100 people seem to have a significant problem. Yeah. I mean, people, a certain number of people are at risk. They're bound to get schizophrenia at those windows. I think it's right around 20 and right around 30 years old seems to be the window. Really? Yeah.

There's a very specific window at that? No, it happens at a very specific time. Do they think it's like transitionary periods in your life with additional stress, like you have a breaking point or something? It isn't really clear. It may be a developmental issue. Boys or men are still developing into their 20s, right? Their brain development is incomplete. I think it's in their 50s. Well, yeah, that's true too. But there's certain brain structures that are not

finished at that age. Honestly, I don't know. I'm out of my depth there. Yeah. What was the motivation to write this new book? So the motivation for this book grew out of a longstanding interest in our relationship to plants. I've been obsessed with plants since I was like an eight-year-old gardener. And I've written a lot about how we use plants and how plants use us. And that relationship has been of keen interest. And I looked at food. Eating plants is obviously one of the big things we do with them and a big part of our relationship. And then when I started working on psychedelics, I was really struck by the fact that one of the things humans have used plants for forever is to change consciousness.

humans have used plants for forever is to change consciousness. And that seemed like a very curious phenomenon. But every culture on earth, with one notable exception, has some plant or fungus that they use regularly and often ceremonially to change consciousness. The exception are the Inuit, the Eskimos. And it's only because nothing good grows where they live. That's interesting. Do they change their consciousness at all? Do they use breathing exercises? They may well. I don't know because there are many ways to change your consciousness. You're right.

Breathing can do it. Fasting can do it. Extreme exertion can do it. So there are other tools for doing it. But most humans have used plants. And, of course, there's alcohol too, which changes consciousness. It's, it's, alcohol is not produced by plants. It's actually produced by a fungus. But so I was, I've always wanted to explore this issue of why do we do this? What good is it to change

consciousness? Because you would think from an evolutionary point of view, it might be a bad idea. You know, when you change consciousness, you're more likely to have accidents. You're more vulnerable to predators. And so you would think that it would be kind of edited out by natural selection, but it hasn't been. If drug taking were really bad, the drug takers would be gone from evolution, and they're not. And so I started thinking, well, what are they good for? How do we use drugs? Why are they part of our lives? And we're at this very interesting moment where the drug war is starting to end. I think we can see the end of the drug war. The voters have spoken, and they've essentially sued for peace. We've had all these ballot initiatives. What happened in Oregon last fall was amazing.

I think something just happened in California. Yes. The California State Senate voted to legalize psychedelics and also MDMA. Legalize or decriminalize? You know, they sell it as decriminalized, but if you read the bill, it's legalized. So what is the specifics? Well, the specifics are that the substance in the bill, which are LSD, MDMA, psilocybin, ibogaine, which is troubling given the specific risks associated with ibogaine, which we can talk about. DMT, yeah, DMT is in there. I don't know if 5-MeO DMT is in there.

I don't think it is. Mescaline-producing cacti. And basically, personal use, growing, and social sharing is legal. No commercialization. Although that gets a little weird because if a guide, let's say an underground guide, charges you $1,500 for her services and just gives you the psilocybin. Is that commercialization or not? Right. Is it legal to be a guide? Like that seems commercial. Even if someone brings their own. Yeah.

Right? I mean, you're sort of profiting off of the use. Frankly, some aspects of this bill do not strike me as being completely well thought out. I mean, including Ibogaine, where you really should have a health examination before you use it. Why is that? Well, Ibogaine has shown some... This is an African shrub that is a psychedelic used in Africa for a long time. Which is apparently phenomenal for people with...

Opiate. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, because in addition to giving you the psychedelic experience, it removes the craving for opium. So, there's a lot of clinics in Mexico who are using it. However, the medical advice is you should be on a heart monitor the whole time you're using it because it can lead to various cardiovascular events. And so it's not as benign as some other psychedelics in terms of the physiology. So it's not as benign as some other psychedelics in terms of the physiology. Anyway, this still has to get through the assembly. It's amazing it got passed. This just happened June 1st. And then we also had a whole bunch of decriminalization initiatives. Washington, D.C. voted to decriminalize plant medicines and entheogens. voted to decriminalize plant medicines and entheogens. So we're getting to this new place where the public has had it with the drug war. Neither party really wants to fight it anymore.

Even the Republicans are backing off on drug war. It's not part of the culture wars now, which is fascinating. We are recognizing how much damage was done, how many people's lives were ruined, how many people have, you know, we've incarcerated around the drug war, and it hasn't worked. You know, we have more overdoses now than we had before the opiate crisis. You know, the biggest health problem related to the drug war has been, I'm sorry, the biggest problem since we started this drug war, public health problem, has been the opiate crisis. 800,000 people have overdosed. Most of them started on legal opiates.

Purdue Pharma, you know, did a lot more damage than any illicit drug, you know, economy. Doesn't Johnson & Johnson just decide to get out of the opiate game? Yeah, and they settled with the government and said they're going to stop selling them. Yeah, I know. It sounds like, you know, $230 million or whatever it was. I know. That's nothing. Yeah.

So we're at this new moment where we have to figure out, okay, if we're not going to just make them illegal, what are we going to do with them? How do we fold them into our culture? Right. And one of the things I wanted to do in this book was start this conversation, this kind of more grown-up conversation about how we use drugs in our lives, how we've used them in the past, remind people that most of us do have a relationship with a plant drug, caffeine being, you know, which I'm enjoying right here.

Tea, just a small amount of caffeine. Yeah, relatively small. This is a black rifle coffee espresso. That's serious stuff. That's 300 milligrams. You didn't offer me any of that. You want one? No, I think it'd be a bad idea, but thank you. 300 milligrams, that's serious. I think you're a teetotaler. I'm a lightweight on caffeine, but I am dependent, as I learned in the course of the book.

So I wanted to learn, I wanted to talk a little bit about our relationship to drugs. What's a healthy relationship? I mean, drug abuse is real. Drug abuse is a bad relationship to a drug. It's not about breaking the law. It's a bad relationship. What do you think are the motivations for keeping these drugs illegal? I mean, clearly, there's got to be some influence by the pharmaceutical companies. There has to be, because there are alternative treatments to a lot of different things. And if they looked at their bottom line and if they were being shrewd, like very cold calculated money assassins, they would probably say, you know, it's not a good idea for us for all these drugs to be legal. Yeah. But they don't have a leg to stand on after starting the opioid crisis.

But it doesn't matter if they have a leg to stand on. No. If there's no moral correct argument for their stance, they're still doing it to make money. Yeah. And they may be out lobbying to keep these laws. But it's interesting, it's the citizens who are overturning them. A lot of these are ballot initiatives that you can't lobby. And what happened in Oregon, I mean, there were two things there. One was decriminalizing personal use of all drugs, even hard drugs, and directing people who are busted into treatment, harm reduction approach. And then even more interesting was this Proposition 109, which legalizes psilocybin therapy specifically, but does it in a very thoughtful way. specifically, but does it in a very thoughtful way. The proposition basically obligates the state health department to set up an institution that will regulate guides, train, regulate, and certify guides, and regulate the growing of psilocybin. It's kind of an amazing idea that the state will do this. And so far, the governor has been very cooperative. Whether the FDA will put up with it,

it's kind of usurping their power to regulate drugs. There's a whole lots of complications, but it's going to be really interesting to watch. But it's the beginning of this process of figuring out a culture around drugs rather than just say no. And I think that's going to be the cultural work that we're going to be doing over the next couple decades, is figuring out a safe way, a productive way to use these substances instead of simply banning them. Yeah, I think that's what's really important, is people do have to understand the risks involved

in all these different things, and it's not simple. It's not clean, and we have to understand dosages, we have to understand the set and setting, what's the right way to use them, when not to use them. Certain people will be vulnerable, especially people that are psychologically vulnerable. They shouldn't be experimenting with these things. Because of all of the years of suppression, unfortunately, we don't have a lot to go on in terms of a roadmap. Exactly. And that's why it's going to be hard work. And that's one of the reasons in the third section of this book on mescaline, I spent a lot of time looking at the Native American church,

because I think indigenous use of psychedelics has a lot to teach us. I don't think we can just borrow it, their methods, lock, stock, and barrel. But there's certain principles that are really interesting and helpful. One is you seldom do it alone. You always do it with intention, purpose. There is usually an elder involved to guide you. And it's always surrounded by ritual. And I think that's really significant. And people who use drugs in a ritual way seldom get into trouble, even alcohol. I mean, alcohol, right, does more damage than any of these drugs we're talking about. And so people who use alcohol in a ritual way, which is to say, think of the social rituals we have.

You don't drink till the evening, right? You don't start off in the morning drinking. Or toast to a wedding or something like that. Right. Yeah. That's a ritual that we... And then also that we have alcohol with food very often. We don't drive after we drink. It's a social thing. People who drink that way are not the ones who get in serious trouble with it if they can stick to those rituals and rules. And that's true across the board. So I spent a lot of time interviewing Native Americans about the peyote ceremony and how they use it. And, you know, we think of psychedelics as incredibly disruptive to society. And in some ways it was in the 60s, right? I mean, you know, it think of psychedelics as incredibly disruptive to society. And in some ways it was in the 60s, right?

I mean, you know, it fed the anti-war movement. It led to the generation gap. And lots of, you know, tensions came out of it. A lot of productive things came out of it too. But we think of it as very disruptive. But in the Native American community, you have this model of drug use that's incredibly conservative and moral. It's this very rigid ceremony. Everybody sits around the fire, stares at the fire.

There are rules about which way the basket of peyote passes around the room. There are songs you sing in certain ways. There's drumming. Did you do it? No, I didn't. And I'll tell you why in a second. And the focus is on healing somebody and somebody who's got trauma, someone who has alcoholism, spousal abuse, or a big rite of passage. Someone's going off to the army or whatever it is.

And everyone's attention is focused on that person. And everyone's attention is focused on that person. And Native Americans say it is incredibly therapeutic and it has been vital to the survival of Indian culture, which, as you know, we tried to stamp out. We, meaning white Americans, tried to crush in the 19th century. And that's when peyoteism arose, is when Indian culture was on the verge of complete collapse. It was a really dark moment. They were forcing Indians onto reservations in Oklahoma. They were taking boys, young boys, cutting their hair and sending them off to boarding school with the explicit goal of, this was what the superintendent of one of these schools said, to kill the Indian and save the man.

And peyoteism arose at this moment as a way to hold on to culture and heal trauma. And it worked. Yeah. I don't think there's a particularly long history of peyoteism. It's not ancient. Well, with North American Indians, peyoteism really begins in the 1880s, which is when- Really? Peyoteism really begins in the 1880s, which is when- Yeah. And the church is not actually established till 1918, but it's in the 1880s. However, there were Indians in Texas and many more in Mexico that had been using peyote continually for thousands of years. Do you know what specific tribes?

The Huichol in Mexico. I don't know which the Texas tribes were. And they were using it in the same ritual fashion? We don't know exactly what the ritual was, but they were using it. So the oldest archaeological evidence is from Texas. It's on the Rio Grande. There's something called the Shumla Caves, which is an archaeological dig that was discovered a few decades ago. And they found there peyote effigies, little dolls made out of peyote, and evidence that they were being used ceremonially. So it's the oldest psychedelic.

So even though that chain was broken with some North American tribes, because it only grows, by the way, in Texas. There's a very small band near Laredo where the peyote gardens are. band of uh near laredo where the peyote gardens are and um so it it was kind of rediscovered and moved up to oklahoma and then it's spread around the country from there when you say it's the oldest psychedelic do you mean that we know of that we have evidence it was being used um six thousand years ago really yeah there may be older ones, but I haven't seen the record of that. What is the evidence? It's North American? It's this, yeah.

The Native American Indians? Oh, so that's 6,000 years old? 6,000 years ago. Wow. I mean, I don't know who, you know, which group it was, but there was evidence that there were these religious objects that they created, and they actually made them out of peyote, and they tested it, and it was peyote. So it's been around, even if it hasn't

been in continuous use among American Indians. But I just think that's such an interesting model for how to think about it. And we have to come up with our own cultural container. We're not going to just take the Indian container. It doesn't feel right to us and it would be cultural appropriation. But that's what we have to figure out. What are the proper rituals in which to use psychedelics? Are you aware of the book, The Immortality Key? Yeah. Brian Murarrescu's book?

Fascinating. Fascinating. And he's found, he's writing about evidence of very early use in the old world of psychedelic compounds. Ergot, which is the fungus from which LSD is derived, was found in some communion cups, right, in Spain. That's kind of wild. And the idea that the Eucharist may have involved psychedelic, there was also cannabis found in some Jewish sites from that period. And I've always wondered about wine in Greece, that they would talk about these wild Dionysian revels and they drank wine out of glasses like this big. It had to be something else. Oh, for sure. And also, did you know wine back then had a very low alcohol content?

I didn't know that. All the more reason to suspect that- They were spiking it. They were spiking it with something. We don't know what, I mean, and we don't know that. Yeah. All the more reason to suspect that. They were spiking it. They were spiking it with something. We don't know what, I mean, and we don't know how to, how you would use ergot because ergot can also give you gangrene. Really? Oh yeah. When you take it orally, it would give you gangrene? I don't know. Well, I don't know how else you'd take it, but people, so ergotism was this disease people got when they ate, you know, in a wet year, the rye crop would get all this ergot on it. But people were desperate.

They would still make bread from it. And it would make people kind of crazy. Well, they think that that is the Salem witch trial. Right. That's one theory. And that you have these outbreaks of what was called witchcraft, which is just people having visions and tripping, tripping. Absolutely. Yeah.

And there are episodes all through European history of these outbreaks. St. Vitus d'Ange was another term that was used for this. And those outbreaks coincide with core samples that show particularly- Yeah, and especially wet years when you've got lots of fungus. But the other effect you can get from eating this stuff is gangrene. So if it was consumed as a drug, it was processed in some way to make it safe. And the Eleusian Mysteries that Brian talks about in that book too, which was this rite in Greece that went on for thousands of years

and every great Greek writer, politician participated in this, there was a potion that they would take called a kikion. Everyone was sworn to secrecy. So no one talked about this, but they would take this potion and- Kikion, right? Kikion or kikion. I don't know. My Greek is shitty. K-Y-K-E-O-N. And they would go to the underworld and visit with their ancestors and have these visions. And it kind of makes sense when you think of like Plato's idea that there's an unseen realm right next to this one where the real table is, and this is just the secondary table. But how do we prove these things? You know, the work, these archaeologists are doing interesting work.

And there's going to be a new institute at Harvard working on some of these questions. Yeah, and it is all sparked by Brian's work. I know. And Brian's appearance on this podcast, in fact. Oh, really? Led to that? Initiated these discussions because they realized, like, when you hear him talk about it and you understand the amount of research this guy's done for over a decade pursuing this, and it was a big risk

because until they found the samples that indicated there was ergot inside these vessels, they really didn't know if this was speculative, is this all horseshit? They didn't know, and now they do know. It all makes sense, right? It makes a lot of sense. If anybody's ever done a psychedelic drug, it makes sense.

You know, look, I think psychedelics have had a very profound effect on cultural evolution in many, many ways. produces memes, new ideas, metaphors, theories, and visions that sometimes, not always, ends up changing everything. You know, 99% of the things people, insights people have on psychedelics are probably not that valuable, you know. I mean, they may be personally useful, you know, love is everything, whatever it is. But every now and then, in a certain mind, there's an idea. and it might be a vision of an afterworld. It might be the idea of an unseen other world, a beyond. And then that person tells that story and suddenly this enters culture. Yeah, somebody had a vision. They went up on a mountain and they saw God. It's a very plausible explanation for how religion might get

started. It completely makes sense to me. And in fact, wasn't there, there's been some work at the, one of the universities in Israel where they were, they're trying to connect the acacia tree with the burning bush that Moses saw because the acacia tree apparently is rich in DMT and they're trying to their connection they're making is the burning bush being God was consuming smoked DMT and that they were having this vision that Moses was hasn't mean makes sense if you're you're translating things from ancient Hebrew to Latin to Greek to whatever the fuck they're doing you're gonna lose a lot of whatever they're trying to say

especially we're talking about not know what's a metaphor and what's literal. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. And that's what they think. That's fascinating. I haven't heard about that. I have to follow up on that.

So I'm very interested in the role that psychedelics have played. And it's true in science too, right? I mean, we just took a PCR test, I think, COVID test. And who invented PCR? A scientist named Cary Mullis, who got the idea on an LSD trip in Northern California. And he's talked about it. And he said, LSD allowed me to sit on the molecule and watch and see what was going on. And so that encounter of that molecule with that mind gave us this amazing tool that all of genetics depends on yeah we took a rapid antigen test

okay all right but yeah he's for the fact he's spoken out about that he just said it's not what it's for it shouldn't be used in that regard interesting yeah but anyway it's anybody found it again yeah figured it out and there's you know there's there are many stories through history I mean I think you know the human imagination has a natural history, right? It has to. Everything has a natural history. So what is that natural history? Well, I think drugs of all kinds played a very important role at certain key moments in the evolution of that thing we call the imagination.

Well, I think the last time you were here, we talked about Terence McKenna's stoned ape theory, which is the most fascinating. I know and the one I have the most trouble getting my head around have you talked to Dennis about it? we've talked about it we're doing an event together in a couple weeks and I'm sure it'll come up Dennis is the most convincing

when he discusses it because I haven't heard his whole rap on it but I need to I'll send you a video of him saying it from this podcast. Great. Dennis is brilliant. I totally agree. He's well-versed in the world of psychedelics. Yeah, and in the world of his brother.

Yes, yes, and good and bad, right? And his brother was just such an important figure in the psychedelic world of just spreading the gospel. I so regret i i had i got into it too late to meet him yeah me too i mean to have him on this podcast would have oh my god yeah lost opportunity that would be the guy yeah if people always say like who like living or dead who's the person you wish you could have got is that he's on the list terrence yeah bill hicks and terrence mckenna those would be my So, you know, the issue with that is that how I understand how the impact of psychedelics finds its way into cultural evolution pretty easily. Yeah.

But he's saying it's part of genetic evolution and that it actually changed the genome, as I understand it, and that people's – and accounts for the growth of the size of the human brain. And, you know, the idea that people were exposed to psychedelics on the savanna, which they probably were in the form of mushrooms, and that it was a form of synesthesia in that sounds got associated with ideas and meanings. In the same way, when you take a psychedelic, often you can see musical notes or taste them or whatever. And so this is what gave us language. I still don't get, so the people who had this tool were more likely to reproduce? How does it actually get into the genome? There's a bunch of things that he, I mean, obviously this is purely speculative, right?

He's trying to figure out and connect the dots. And Dennis does a better job, I think, of explaining it from a scientific perspective. But Terrence's position was there was a bunch of things that are happening that coincided with climate change. So these jungles, these tropical rainforests were receding into grasslands. As they were receding into grasslands, the primates were climbing out of trees and experimenting with new food sources. One of the things that they've recognized is that primates, in the presence of undulates,

will flip over their manure and look for these cow patties and look for beetles and grubs because they know that there's always something that's under, bugs oftentimes are under there, and of course, mushrooms are growing on them. So they would experiment by trying these different things to see if they're edible. In consuming psilocybin, particularly in low doses, psilocybin positively affects visual acuity. So it makes you- So they were better hunters? Better hunters, more accurate in edge detection. So there's been studies where if you have two parallel lines, if the parallel line shifts slightly,

the people who are on psilocybin are far more likely to be able to detect that than people that are on the match. Fascinating. Yeah, so that's one. There's some cultures that give psilocybin to their hunting dogs. It makes sense. Yeah. It makes sense. There's a clarity involved in consumption give psilocybin to their hunting dogs. It makes sense. Yeah. It makes sense. There's a clarity involved in consumption of psilocybin where it sort of eliminates anxiety.

It focuses you on tasks at hand, specifically in lower doses. Yeah. Like one of the things that people are doing that I have a lot of friends that are doing it right now is microdosing. Yeah. It's very, very popular. And their perspective is that there's something about microdosing. It's very, very popular. And their perspective is that there's something about microdosing that allows them to be more present. It allows them to feel better and be less anxious. Work better and feel more creative.

The other thing about psilocybin is that it enhances community. So the idea that all these primates were doing it together, they were more loving, more connected, more loyal to each other, and this might have enforced tribal behavior. So that might have been a protective issue. So they were better hunters, more tribal, and it makes them horny. So they're more likely to have sex, more likely to breed. And then with the creativity involved,

the idea was the creativity might have also enhanced their hunting, might have also enhanced tool making, and then, of course, the language aspect of it. The connection of sounds to objects, that it might have initiated that. That was a very good restatement. Thank you. Excellent. That's better than the version in Terrence's book.

Well, it's over the course of two million years that the human brain size doubled, which is crazy. I mean, that is a really- But there are other explanations. I dealt with one of them. I don't think there's only one. No, and it may have been several things happening at the same time. Have you heard about the cooking hypothesis? Yes, I have.

So Richard Wrangham, a Harvard primatologist, and his argument is that is when we learn to cook, Scientologist. And his argument is that is when we learn to cook, which essentially meant we had to spend less metabolic capital digesting food, chewing especially. Chimps spend like six hours a day chewing because they're eating all this uncooked plant material. And when we moved to cooked meat in particular, but cooked food of all kinds, when we moved to cooked meat in particular, but cooked food of all kinds, we didn't need as big a gut and we could afford to run a bigger brain. And I find that theory, and there's some evidence for that. I mean, like if you feed snakes, you know, some on cooked food, some on uncooked food,

they grow much faster on the cooked food. One of the reasons our dogs are so fat these days is we're giving them cooked food when they're not evolved for it because most of the stuff in cans has been cooked. So anyway, it's, you know, there's a lot of speculation in this whole area, but it's fascinating. It is fascinating. And there is a long history of human use of psychedelics. Yeah. And it kind of makes sense that if you probably keep going, you're going to deal with ancient man using it somewhere along the line. Yeah. There's no historical record, but there's no reason to think people just figured it out 6,000 years ago. People ate everything.

They had to. Except things that are connected to psychedelics. And this is where it gets really weird when you get cultures that are really, they don't have a lot of food, but yet they worship cows. Yeah. And why would they worship cows? Well, the speculation is the cows, the manure. The cow patties. Yeah, and then psilocybin grows in the manure. Yeah, there's several cultures where cows are divine. My friend Duncan, he grew up in Asheville, North Carolina, and they used to put some kind of, something in the feed of cows to try to get cows to stop producing psychedelic

mushrooms, because there were so many psychedelic mushrooms mushrooms and these college kids were running out onto the field just picking them and tripping balls all the time. Did it work? I don't know if it worked, but it's a terrible tragedy, even the fact that they did it. Like, what are you doing? Like, it's just some antifungal or something. I don't know what they're doing,

but he said that they would all go out to the fields and find cow shit, and it was apparently just insanely common. Yeah. It is in the Pacific Northwest. I have a brother-in-law who grew up in Vancouver. And he said, yeah, they were out there all the time finding them. But I spent a lot of time hiking in Northern California.

And I go through a lot of cattle land. I've never found one. Really? It may have to be moist, very moist conditions. Yeah. Our cow patties get kind of desiccated. Mushrooms are interesting, right? They have like different kind of specific conditions that they,

like morel mushrooms are really, really delicious. And apparently they favor places where it's been burned. Yeah. I went hunting for them a couple years ago for my last book. And after fires, big forest fires, you can reliably go out there in the spring, just as the snow is melting, they pop up in huge quantities. We found, you know, we were like 10, 20, 30 pounds of morels. And you know, that's a lot of morels. Wow, that's crazy.

It was always on firelands. And the reason, the theory is that these fungi, first of all, most of them live underground, right? I mean, the part we see is just the fruiting body. It's like the apple on the tree. Everything else is underground. That they're happily doing their thing, and then suddenly there's a crisis, and they've lost their hosts. Their hosts are dead. So they have to get out of the forest. So they put up these fruiting bodies and hope that their spores will move them to a place that hasn't burned.

Oh, that's what it is. So, yeah, it's their escape strategy. Wow. And we're helping them by picking it and moving them around. Oh, wow. That's fascinating. Did you dehydrate them and save them? Yeah, we dried as many.

We ate a lot of them. They're so good. I was hunting with a guy who hunts for restaurants in northern california so he sold most of them and i took a couple pounds home um but i didn't i didn't dehydrate i've done that with porcini when i found too many porcini um but i didn't do it more else i just ate them really quickly the only way i've ever gotten them is buy them from distributors online that sell them dried out yeah they're so good they're fantastic but fresh is they're amazing and i haven't had too many occasions. So, but you know, we had a lot of fires last

year in California, so there'll be a lot of morels. It's the one good thing you can say. Is there like, is there a place where the Amanita muscaria reliably grows where it is, does, does have a psychedelic property to it because that's one of those really debatable. Uh, so really debatable mushrooms, really debatable fungi because it's,

some people don't put any faith in the idea that it was involved in Christianity or in Santa Claus or any of that stuff. And some people put all their money on that. They put it all on red. And there's, you know, there is a way to process it. Even drying it apparently gets rid of the toxins, but there's a specific way that they think it was processed that made it a usable hallucinogen. Paul Stamets knows a lot more about this than I do. And he's had an experience with it that he said he would never repeat. He would never repeat it?

Yeah, it was such a bad experience. Oh, not repeat like verbally. No, no, no, no. It's not a secret. So he had a bad experience. Yeah, he did. That it was very toxic and he had a really excruciating day. It was psychedelic but had a lot of other gastrointestinal – I'm not sure exactly what it was.

I remember when I was interviewing him for the last book, he talked about it because I've always been curious about it. This is the mushroom of the old world in particular that is associated with lots of shamanic rituals and the imagery, you know, from, you know, Lewis Carroll to the Santa Claus idea, it just keeps showing up. Yeah. That you would think it had some use or religious, you know, value. But I don't, maybe the method of, maybe like Ergot, the method of processing has just been lost to history. Yeah. McKenna believed that it was different, that it varied genetically, and it also varied seasonably, and that it possibly varied dependent upon the environment.

Or the substrate. Yeah. Well, that's possible. I mean, mushrooms produce different metabolites depending on what they're growing on to some extent the the other thing that I Wanted to say was like in some cultures in the absence of psychedelics. They would do something called ordeal poisoning What is that? You know? It's like you would almost go through a near-death experience that you could get out of Like it was reliable. Through supplication or? No, through this poison.

Through some sort of plant toxin or some, see if you can Google ordeal poisoning. Trial by ordeal. Yeah. So what they would do is in the absence of psychedelics, they'd put themselves through this ritual, meaning that on the other end of it, there would be some kind of life-changing revelation.

Just sort of like. A near-death experience. Like a real near-death experience. But that this was reliably repeatable because this poison didn't kill you, but it fucked you up so bad you thought you were going to die and in the middle of these sweats

and these... Like Stamets was talking about with Amanita muscaria. Some cultures such as the... Oh, boy. You want to try that one? Afik Uburutu. People of present-day Nigeria.

Present-day Nigeria would administer poisonous calabar bean, known as a seri in ethic, which contains physo-stigmine. Physo-stigmine? In an attempt to detect guilt. A defendant who vomited up the bean was innocent. A defendant who became ill or died was considered guilty. Residents of Madagascar could accuse...

I don't think this is the same. This isn't it. This isn't it. Did you Google ordeal poisoning? Uh-huh. Yeah. Huh. Ordeal poisoning rituals?

These are all... This seems to be... This is a whole Wikipedia on trial by ordeal And this is the part about poisoning So this is a different kind of trial This is a criminal trial Ordeal poisoning As

I don't know How would you Google that As a psychedelic ritual It wouldn't be psychedelic Poison in Google image search brings up a lot of stuff i just sort of found on this because it looked like it was official wikipedia i think they used to do things like that to try to figure out whether or not someone was hiding things like whether or not they had knowledge of a crime or whether they were guilty but i think they also

did it as rites of passage, you know, for certain cultures that didn't have access to psychedelics, but they recognized that it was important to have some sort of a moment. Right. Some sort of a- A liminal experience, right? A definable moment where you got through it and you go, congratulations, Michael, you passed through the gate. Well, you know, look, I mean, for a lot of people, that is the psychedelic experience becomes a sort of rehearsal for death, right?

Yeah. I mean, they feel like they're dying or there's, you know, I had an experience of my ego completely detonating and it was gone. And it's a death you come back from. Yeah. And there's something that teaches you a lot of things. And so it's interesting, you know, people have put their bodies in these extreme places, whether it's with chemicals, fasting too, you know, the people who go, or isolation, right? People who go out on vision quests, right? And they go

five days without food. They enter an altered state of consciousness and that becomes part of the right. Even just staying awake. Yeah. Yeah. So it's part of human nature. And I think it's a really interesting part of human nature, the desire for these transcendent experiences that we don't talk about enough or acknowledge and, or teach our children about, that they're going to have these desires and that there are safe ways to obtain them and unsafe ways to obtain them. But I really do think that the kind of cultural container you build around them is the best assurance of safety. It's one of the problems that we have in this culture is that we've suppressed this information for so long and lied.

Because of the drug war. Yeah, and lied about the effects of it while we were supporting drugs that did irreparable harm. So much damage. Yeah. I agree. I think that there's so much misinformation that came out of the drug war. It's still coming out of the drug war. I mean, on the nature of addiction, for example, that it's all about chemicals. It's not all about chemicals. There are many people who can use an addictive drug without getting addicted. When we were in Vietnam, 20% of the soldiers had a heroin addiction in country while they were there. 20%? 20%, okay?

They were all using heroin, or a lot of them were, and 20% were addicted. When they got home, 95% just stopped using. No treatment, just stopped because the environment had changed. They didn't need it. They didn't need to medicate themselves anymore. The withdrawal from opiate addiction is not as it's depicted in the drug war. It's a bad flu. It's actually withdrawal from alcohol is a lot worse. Withdrawal from alcohol can kill you. And benzos, right? Yeah. Oh, yeah. That's a really dangerous one, too. But addiction is, you know, I mean, look at the geography of the opioid crisis, right? I mean, these are places where the opportunities have dried up. You know, there are no jobs. People's prospects are terrible. And they're, you know, they're rightly called

deaths of despair. And whereas people in other environments can use opiates without a problem. And we don't pay enough attention to that. That, you know, that it's contextual whether people get addicted or not, or it's a, it's a function of their history that they're, they're people, very, most addicts, according to a lot of research, which had trauma in their lives at some point. And they're dealing with that. Have you talked to Dr. Carl Hart? Yes, I have.

Well, I've exchanged email with him. And I just read his book. Yeah, Drug Use for Grownups. It's a really interesting and courageous book. He's a fascinating person. Yeah. And brilliant. And because of his brilliance and because of the fact that he's a professor at Columbia,

but yet has the courage to talk about regular use of drugs. Yeah. Hard drugs, so-called. He loves heroin. Yeah. He sniffs heroin. He said it makes him closer to his wife.

It makes him a kinder person. Yeah. And it's so easy to dismiss coming from someone who maybe is not an academic and someone who's not just so articulate and when it comes from a guy like him you got to go what Pete yeah I know you do fucking heroin like yeah I mean we've learned that heroin is just the most evil chemical going he loves coke he loves cocaine yeah he said nice things to say about meth he said it's very similar to MDMA I know it a pretty wild book to read.

You should talk to him because he's a fascinating guy to talk to because he's so open. Yeah. He's so open with it all and a genuinely good person. And he's trying to open this same conversation, right? Yes. On like how these substances are going to become decriminalized. How do we fold them into our culture? What are our models? And, you know, a lot of people think cannabis is the model. And I really don't think that's true. You know, that, and a lot of people

in the cannabis business who say psilocybin is the next cannabis, and they imagine it being, you know, sold next to the THC gummy bears in these dispensaries. And I just think psychedelics are a much more consequential, serious experience that has to be handled with more care and needs every drug. I mean, one of the problems of the drug war is it put all illicit drugs in the same basket, right? And they're not. They're so different. Psychedelics are different than the opiates, and the opiates are different than cannabis. And we have to, we would never lump anything else together the way we've lumped these drugs. And so we're going to have to look at each of

them on their own terms. And that process, you know, I think it's beginning. And I think Carl's book is part of that. I think culturally, we're going to deal with an issue if we combine psilocybin and cannabis the way – because cannabis can be used so easily and lightly and recreationally. You can smoke a joint and go see a movie with your friends and laugh and giggle. Mushrooms can be used that way if you microdose. Microdosing, you know, I wouldn't have an issue with. But tripping balls, like full on, eat a bag, go to another dimension, that's a life-changing experience. When I go to a pot store in L.A. and I see the Purple Haze right next to the AK-47 or Alaskan Thunderfuck, it seems, I just, it seems weird to have mushrooms right there too.

It's like, do you know what you're selling these people? You're literally selling the gateway to God. Like we should be a little more careful with this or at least treat it with respect. And approach it with a little more reverence. Yes. Yes. That's what I would like. What I would like is, and the problem with this is of course the cult of personality.

I would love like psychedelic centers. If there was some place where people could go to have these experiences but what i worry is that the person who is giving out these psychedelics and the person who is uh you know maybe setting the set and setting for the becomes a guru or becomes it becomes cult-like yeah because there's a potential there special especially for the uninitiated who's meeting the initiated. And they all have, you know, this kind of way of talking that seems a little contrived and they're wearing wooden beads. And they have the answer and they know the key to the universe. There's a weird phenomenon with psychedelics. You know,

we talk a lot about ego dissolution on psychedelics, but there's also ego inflation. Yes. And that happens. And we've seen that in the culture and that people who are so – have had a revelation about psychedelics and they want to share it with the world and they become gurus. And that's a phenomenon to watch out for. I agree. I think someday we will move to – I'm very interested in this process of how psychedelics move into the society. And I see three paths, basically. There's the medical path, which is, you know, we're pretty far down that path. The FDA will probably approve MDMA within, what does Rick Doblin say, two years or something like that? Yeah. Maybe three for

psilocybin or four. So it's not far away at all. And ketamine is currently in use pretty widely right now for therapy. And that is, for many people, that is suggesting a model. So there's Field Trip Health, this company that's building ketamine clinics all around the country, very lavish spa-like places where you can get a ketamine experience with a nurse or a doctor present. They're very expensive. And they're doing this basically to work out the kinks so that they can move to psilocybin and MDMA when it's ready. So that'll be one kind of elite way that people will have the experience because it'll cost thousands of dollars. And then there'll be the medical model. And that'll probably be more clinic-based. Nobody's figured out exactly. And then there'll be the religious model. And I think

that's a really interesting one to watch. In the same way the Native American church and two ayahuasca churches have the constitutional right to use a psychedelic as their sacrament, there are a lot of other new churches forming now. And given this Supreme Court and its expansive interpretations of religious liberty, basically they're cutting huge amounts of slack that for reasons of religious conscience, you can be exempted from all sorts of federal regulations and laws. I mean, Hobby Lobby and the decision just the other day. That when some of these psychedelic churches find their way up to the Supreme Court, this Supreme Court is going to have a hard time saying no.

And there is a group of psychedelic lawyers who are looking for the right cases to bring through the system. Boy, does that sound like an oxymoron. Yeah, psychedelic lawyers. It really is. They call themselves that. That's great. I love it. I'm glad they're out there.

They're based in Boulder, as you would guess. I mean, it's the ultimate jumbo shrimp. Of course they're based in Boulder. I fucking love Boulder. It's too good. It's too good. But it's going to be like an exploding cigar for, you know, Justice Alito when one of these cases come up, because they're going to have trouble saying no. Because the precedents are being established. So I think we'll have this religious path, we'll have this retreat center path, and we'll have this medical path. And the most accessible may be the medical path, since it'll get, presumably, if it really works, get covered by insurance. Yeah, especially for people that have PTSD,

soldiers, police officers, things along those lines. Women have been abused. People have been abused, yes. Are you aware what Alex Gray is doing? Not right now. Do you know Alex Gray? Yeah, sure, the artist. He has formed a church. He has religious tax exempt status and he's building this insane, spectacular chapel in upstate New York. He bought a bunch of land and he was in some sort of a dispute with the town, but I think they've settled that because he's not paying any taxes because he's a church. town but I think they've settled that because he's not paying any taxes because he's a church but I mean if anybody can do that yeah he'll get the iconography down oh my god you got to see what the place looks like have you been there no I have not but I must I must go well I spend part of the

year in that part of the world so I will check it out I've had Alex on a couple times and he's a genuine gem of a human being and just I've never met him oh he's he's the real deal times and he's a genuine gem of a human being and just, uh, I've never met him. Oh, he's, he's the real deal, man. He's like when you're around him, like he, first of all, he's so kind. And as an artist, he's phenomenal. He's so brilliant as an artist, but he, that's him. He's walking the walk. I mean, so is LSD a sacrament in this, in this church? You'd have to ask him I wouldn't want to speak don't get him in trouble I think he's a big fan of the tryptamines in particular but LSD as well Yeah, but the the artwork is so the iconography the the imagery that he portrays is the best

the best interpretation of Tryptamine experiences that I've ever seen because he's he's figured out how to express the visions in normal consciousness. You try to repeat what you saw and you try to express it with words. Words are the most crude and clumsy tools to express psychedelics, but there's something about,

like pull up some of it, like the one where there's this weird gold and I think it's gold and blue one that I swear I saw something entirely similar to that when I was under an experience. I was like, oh, he went. I wonder if there's like little rooms you go into or little places you go into based on but all those are great they're all great there's an Albert Hoffman one there he's got a great one version of the stone day that one in the upper left-hand corner is super similar to some stuff I've seen before super similar like as they expand and move and those things are all constantly moving and shifting

that's what it looks like he just so his place is called the i think the place in new york city was called the chapel of sacred mirrors and i think he's i think that's what he's calling it's called calling it cosm right is that what is uh the place and up show um there pictures of the yeah of the building it's crazy because it's basically his art 3d printed as the out of outside of the building so like if you would go to like an ancient egyptian temple yeah their temple would be covered in all this incredible artwork sculpture he's doing a similar thing but with his vision interpreted into 3D sculpture. So it's wild, wild shit. Is he paying for this himself? I don't know how he's doing it.

I mean, I think people are donating. I think there's a lot going on. You know, I think he's, but. I have to make a field trip. He's just so genuine. Yeah. I mean, out of all the people, like if everybody who is a proponent of psychedelics

was that guy, like this is, okay, this is the image of what it's going to look like so see it looks on the outside very similar to his artwork yeah it does but it also has like these feelings of egypt in it and like i don't know i'm just very egyptian yeah and like this alien language he's got scrolled across it. Look at the interior. That probably means something, too. I mean, I don't even know what it means. That interior down there is not the interior, I don't think, of the actual place. I can't find pictures.

They might still be making it. I don't know. He's amazing, though. And what he does is... Oh, there it is. It's called Entheon. That's what it is. Entheon.

Right. Yeah, hit that video. Let's see what it looks like. Sorry, it's not built yet. Okay, so, well, they're in the middle of building it, though. I do know that some work has been done. But last time he was on was how many years ago, Jamie? Three?

Yeah, sure. Somewhere around there? Yeah. So, yeah, okay. So he is in the middle of this. So they're building it. Yeah. I mean, this has got to be crazy expensive.

It's probably taking a long-ass time. But it's going to be a lot of galleries, a lot of- When you think of the craftsmen, you need to do what we saw on the exterior. Yeah. And, again, most of it is being done, I think- Secret writing. With 3D printing. But I'm just glad he's out there.

Well, you know, this is kind of one of the benefits of psychedelics coming out of the closet after all these years, right? I mean, people can use them in their art. They can use them in their architecture. Have you ever heard of a house called Asido Dorado in Joshua Tree? No. There's an LSD-inspired house. You can rent it. Really?

Is it on Airbnb? I stayed there. I don't know if it's on Airbnb, but you can rent it. And we were shooting for a documentary there. It is so trippy. It's gold and mirrors. Every surface is mirrored. So you don't know what's up and down. It would actually be kind of a scary. Yeah, there it is. Thank you. Aceto Dorado. Anyway, it's on the edge of the desert in Joshua Tree. And I actually can't recommend it as a place to stay. It was too disorienting. Why was it disorienting? The mirrors? Yeah, because you'd look down at the floor and

you'd see a reflection of the dining room table in six dimensions. sounds perfect I love all the cactus around it too that's awesome anyway it's it's pretty cool into the landscape that place is so strange Joshua tree is so bizarre it's one of the trippier landscapes and in fact people go there a trip all the time oh yeah all my friends do yeah my friend Ari's right my friend Ari Shafir runs a festival every year like an informal festival called Shroom Fest. And uh- In Joshua Tree?

Yeah, well he does it, they do it a lot of times out at Joshua Tree, but he encourages people to do it everywhere they are. You don't have to go to a place, but is that in August? Is that when Ari's uh- What a terrible time to go to Joshua Tree. It's awfully hot. I don't know if they're going to Joshua Tree.

Ari's living in New York City now, so I don't think he's doing it out there. But a lot of the trips that they've done, they have done out there. But I think we're going to see now, you know, an explosion of writing, of art. It's just like people are coming out of the closet, talking about their experiences in a way that you just couldn't do a few years ago. Or you did it at great risk to your reputation. And it's going to affect art.

It's going to affect culture. It's going to affect everything. Yeah. And I think in a good way. I think one of the benefits of, cross your fingers, of these psychedelics is the enhancement of the feeling of love and community, which is what everybody needs right now. Yeah.

So I think that's a really interesting theme. And my gut says, yes, I mean, that the nature of the psychedelic experience could make people better people, make them feel more connected, more compassionate. But I don't think we can say that with confidence yet. I think we actually have to do science about that to figure out. I mean, there's some preliminary research, for example, that was done at Imperial College in London that shows that people's nature connectedness goes up. Their scores of how connected you feel to the natural world. And tolerance for authoritarianism goes down. Openness of personality goes up. So these are preliminary. But if you think about who has participated in

these studies, they tend to be inclined in that direction already. You really have to get like the Koch brothers or Trump or somebody who's not inclined to like nature, especially, and do it to them and see if it changes their attitudes. Because I think we may be having people on the same side of the culture having reinforcing experiences. But I don't know. And it's something I would love to see research done on. That would be a great thing to do as a therapy for someone who is, like maybe you've been a sexual harasser at work. And they make you go to some place and have a psychedelic experience to realize the error

of your ways. It'd be much gentler than the chemical castration they used to talk about. Well, we don't have to go that far, but I mean, you know, just maybe that's even a bad example, but maybe someone who's been accused of fraud or maybe someone who's embezzling money or maybe someone who's done something like really unethical and you can pull aside and say, listen, this is harming you and you don't even realize it's harming you. You think you're getting away with these things and having these psychedelic experiences maybe, because that's one of the more confusing but illuminating things that you do learn from psychedelics is that things that you've done to other people have also harmed you and you don't think about it until you're forced into reflection and one of the things is about psychedelics is

the ruthlessly introspective nature of some of the journeys that you go on where you really are forced to look at yourself and your actions and come to Jesus with it. You really have to because they don't allow you any of that. And people call it bad trips when you try to fight it. No, that's not the right term. Yeah. So that was a very interesting theme that came up with interviewing Native Americans. They would talk about psychedelics as if the peyote had a gaze and it saw right into them. And they also used the metaphor of a mirror that in the same way this one Native American had this beautiful image. He said in the same way, you know, you step up to the mirror to make sure you don't have spinach in your teeth or something like that. And you check and make sure you're ready to go out into society.

The peyote allows us to see ourselves and see what's wrong and correct it. And I thought that was a very powerful idea. And that the idea that peyote had a gaze and they teach their children this, that the peyote can see into you and they're socialized in this belief. And that it's sort of like a superego, right? It becomes a conscience. And that's also a very powerful idea. Just fascinating that it was so late in their history. And at a very- In the nick of time, really.

Incredibly desperate time for their culture, which is eradicated by these intruding Europeans. Which is why, just one point on that too, I would hate if my discussion of peyote and Native Americans started a fad for using peyote. There is just not enough peyote. Really? Yeah. No.

It's in very short supply. The peyote lands, you know, there's ranching on it. They're building windmills. There's poaching that's going on. And you asked me earlier whether I'm coaching of yeah no not San Pedro peyote peyote cat what is it what is the San Pedro girl I'll talk about I'll talk about that in a second it's a different cactus that's not endangered at all is that do you get masculine from that yes

okay so mess so there's another way if you're interested and I'll talk about that but masculine and peyote are really similar, right? So mescaline is the chemical produced both by peyote and San Pedro. Oh, okay. So they're two very different cacti that happen to produce the same alkaloid, which is called mescaline. So there is a big effort underway in the Native American community to save peyote. It's a conservation movement. It's something called the Indigenous Peyote

Conservation Initiative, IPCI, and they really deserve our support. And they're trying to buy up these ranch lands so that the Native Americans can pilgrimage down there, pick their own peyote. There's a very safe way to cut it, to harvest it, where it will regenerate. And there's another way that's often used where it doesn't regenerate. And it takes 15 years from seed to button, usable button. So cultivating it is a challenge. And Indians don't believe that cultivated peyote is the same or as good as wild-grown peyote. So I finally decided after interviewing quite a few Native Americans that I shouldn't use it and that non-natives should stay away from peyote because we've taken so much from Native Americans. And this is a tool that's been really helpful to them in healing in their cultures. And there are other ways to get mescaline.

And there are other ways to get mescaline. So I decided that would be my tiny contribution is not using it. Is there an effort to reintroduce it in terms of like to plant it places? Part of this initiative is that they're starting peyote in nurseries and then planting it in the wild. And we'll see how that works. It's a pokey. I grew it in my garden for a while. It is the pokeyest plant.

It just doesn't do anything. It just sits there. It's very slow growing. It looks like a stone. It's very low to the ground. It's quite beautiful. Can you pull up? I don't think I know what it looks like.

I know what the San Pedro looks like. And check out if there's flowering peyote too. It flowers beautifully. But it's just so precious. There's more on the Mexican side of the border. But even that is under threat from mining and all these tomato greenhouses that they're building. So they're just kind of—we need to take care of it. Well, it's crazy that it's so slow growing. I know.

15 years. I mean, that is nuts. I know. Well, it grows in a—yeah, there's some that's longer. See, it looks like a stone. Or it looks like a pincushion. Wow. Now that's somebody's growing it.

I've got a bigger one that's not too small. There's a big one with its babies. They spin off these little babies. And if you harvest it correctly, like you cut right underneath the button, there is a taproot. Yeah, you see the taproots there. And if you preserve the taproot, it'll regenerate. But a lot of poachers and others just pull out the whole plant like a carrot, and then that destroys it. Wow. But you see, it's all the actions underground. In a way, it's like a mushroom, right? It's doing a lot of work underground and not much above ground.

And it has the, instead of spines, it has this kind of furry flower or furry, I don't know what you call that thing. It's in place of spines. What a fascinating looking creature. Yeah. It almost looks like a sea creature. Yeah. Cactus alone, I mean, cactiacti are wild i've just started growing them so i so i have a lot of san pedro in my garden now which is legal to grow i should point out also peyote is

illegal to grow illegal illegal to grow really yeah so you're breaking the law you're manufacturing a schedule one substance but san pedro is weirdly enough San Pedro is illegal. I think it just is legal to grow. It had just escaped notice. They just never... Sort of like salvia? Yeah, kind of like that. The taxonomy of San Pedro is a mess. There are three or four different species.

They've all interbred. And they'd have to pin down the species to make it illegal. But I think it was just not on their radar when they were drawing up the schedule. So it's grown as an ornamental. You can buy it in nurseries. You can buy it online. It grows very quickly compared to other cacti. It's very pretty.

It's much more vertical. It's a columnar cactus. The point at which you break the law is when you start preparing the tea, which is a pretty simple process of essentially making, it's like a vegetable stock. You know, you remove all the thorns and slice it and you get these beautiful stars because it's a six spine thing. And then you boil it for like three days. Three days? Yeah. Why do I have to boil it for so long i don't know i think it may be um i can't believe you can't get all the peyote all the mescaline out of it and less than that but i was told three days that was the recipe and what do

they do once they boil it uh after you boil it then you it kind of turns to mush, so you have to filter it. And then you have this tea. And it's a fairly mild psychedelic, I would say. And peyote is too. So it's a very different phenomenology than other psychedelics. Have you ever used mescaline? No, I haven't. So I use synthetic mescaline for writing this book in the name of research. And I also used San Pedro. Mescaline, I got interested in mescaline in part because everybody I knew in the psychedelic community, when I was researching how to change your mind, I'd say, so what's your favorite psychedelic?

And I was so surprised to hear how many people said mescaline because it's not around. Nobody's doing research with it. It's like, what happened to mescaline? It's like the orphan psychedelic. So I wanted to figure out what that was all about. And there are a couple of reasons. A big problem with it is it takes about 14 hours. Oh, wow. And you're done with mescaline before mescaline is done with you. And so I just remember at the end of this very long day, I was like, I just want to have some dinner and go to bed. But it wasn't happening. Wow. So it was, for me, it was like 12 hours.

And what was the experience like? So it was a really interesting experience. There were not hallucinations. And in the same way some psychedelics take you out of yourself and out of this world to another world, this one immersed you more deeply in the world in front of you than you ever have been before. So that you get completely absorbed in material life. And you could spend an hour thinking about this cup or looking at a flower or Huxley famously, Aldous Huxley, you know, stared at the folds of his trousers for an hour and like had all these revelations. It's about the here and now, this intense experience of the present moment. That's like nothing I'd ever have. And it's almost overwhelming. that's like nothing I'd ever have. And it's almost overwhelming. There's this sense of the immensity of existence. And there's like, oh my God, stuff, existence. But a lot of it is just

very contemplative. You're very lucid. It's fairly gentle. I didn't have any gastrointestinal upset or anything. I had periods at the peak where I felt a little out of control mentally. I remember trying to meditate to calm down and whoever was meditating was someone else. And then someone else was in my mind meditating. I was like, that's not working. In what way? I just closed my eyes and I was this like South American woman, peasant woman meditating. It's like, where did she come from? You know, it was the, I mean, I had been doing research on San Pedro and it's a, it's a South American, um, cactus from Peru. And it was this Peruvian woman who just

showed up. Do you think that was just, uh, like you had this idea of who used it and that was imprinted in your memories? And'm guessing yeah i'm guessing that um i had an association of mescaline with i've been interviewing people in peru who used it ceremonially and i had this image of this woman and i work with this uh healer who works with san pedro and she was kind of cut into that image too too. A little bit of her, too. You know, McKenna had a really weird idea about psychedelic experiences. That we always want to think of each individual psychedelic experience we have as being our experience. But he believed that there was a database connected to each entheogen. And so each one of these substances, you weren't just experiencing it,

you were experiencing the trips of millions of people over thousands of years. It's like Carl Jung's idea of collective unconscious, right? That there's this imagery that is now hardwired in our bodies. And that's why cultures produce art that has all these kind of recurring motifs. Well, we know the DMT story, right? With the machine elves and the various, you know, a lot of people have the same imagery on that drug. Now, whether that, whether Terrence McKenna started that, because that was a meme he introduced to the culture, you'd have to find some innocent culture and see if they have the same experience. They had never heard about that idea? I did not have machine elves in my consciousness, but I did hear literally, not even hearing it,

like when they would say things to you, but one of the things they said was, do not give in to astonishment, which was exactly what McKenna used to always say. Do not give in to astonishment. And then the other thing was I love you. They would be, but like a child, like I love you 600 million, 500 thousand times.

They would say it in this crazy way and then they would go look at this. And every time they would go look at this, they'd show you something more spectacular than you had seen before. Like every time the visuals, like you would think these visuals are impossible to pass and then you go look at this.

And it would be even more insane. Now why not give in to astonishment? What's the idea behind that? I think the idea is you could be so blown away by what's in front of you. And this is from McKenna's words. So again, I don't know how much of what I was experiencing was these things communicating with me

because I never heard anybody say that they said look at this or I love you six million five hundred thousand times yeah because they were talking like a child says I love you a billion million trillion times you know what I mean like yes one of my daughters would say something like that but it was it wasn't sure if I was hearing this because I was preparing because I'd read and listened to McKenna talk about it, or if what was going on was some sort of a concerted effort to get you to just pay attention to this and don't freak out. Don't go, oh my God, this is too much. I can't do this. I can't do that.

Because it's so mind blowing. You've had the experience. Yeah. No, I'm no. It's so freaky that don't give into astonishment is almost like it's a good primer, a good code to follow. Like,

let's just let it happen. Just give into it. Don't whatever you do. Don't try to fight it and give it. Well, that's key. I mean, I,

the most important lesson I learned from both my experience and all the teachers that I worked with is surrender. And psychedelics teach us how to surrender, which is useful in a lot of other contexts too. Yes. But when you surrender to the experience is when you're least likely to have a bad time, when you're not going to fight. a bad time, when you're not going to fight, you know, when you're, when you feel your ego dissolving, your, your natural reaction, your ego's natural reaction is to hold on, right? And defend itself. But when I learned that, no, you just got to go with that. Let, if you, if you're going crazy, if you think you're going to melt or, or, uh, you know, die, go with it and, and, and you'll pass through into something better and that that reliably works

the last time i did it there was uh like like a fractal of gestures there was like an infinite number of gestures giving me the finger like this and i was like what really on a trip like fuck you and then i realized my head but i realized what they were trying to say to me i was i was realizing they're saying you take yourself too seriously and then i went oh and then they were like this like they're like nodding at me i was like oh okay you're right yeah like immediately because thank you i was yeah i was like okay you're right you're right you're right because like someone's saying fuck you you're like no fuck you yeah and then they were like come on and i was like oh you're right you're right and they're like and they're like nodding so you were having a defensive reaction and they were

exactly you got over it well they were letting me know whatever that they is yeah what is that i don't know if that's your subconscious i don't know if that's something about your imagination your visual cortex interacting with these alkaloids, or if what's really going on is it's a pathway to something else, like it's a way to experience consciousness or something, some force that's around us all the time. You could pretend that you have the answer, but I don't know. No, we don't know. We really don't know. I mean, I tend to think that these are creations of our minds, but that's just a hypothesis. When the Dalai Lama sat down with a bunch of neuroscientists, they started this dialogue. And the neuroscientists started from the assumption that consciousness is produced by the brain. And the Dalai Lama

very calmly said, well, that's an interesting hypothesis. And he's right. That's all it is, is a hypothesis. Consciousness could be fields. It he's right. That's all it is, is a hypothesis. Consciousness could be fields. It could be something Aldous Huxley believed and other people, Henri Bergson, the philosopher, that we should think of our minds as like radio receivers or TV receivers and that the consciousness, we have, what our brains do is tune in to frequencies of consciousness that exist outside of us. And in the same way you wouldn't look in the TV to find the woman giving you the weather report. You know she's not there. Our assumption that all the action is there may be wrong.

Yeah. There's a lot of people that want to attach consciousness to inanimate objects as well which is very strange consciousness and even memories i think it was sheldrick i think rupert sheldrick yes well yeah i mean he he believes consciousness is a field morphogenetic fields and that the communication you see say, you know, schools of fish and how they turn or flocks of birds. Yeah. That they're communicating. They're participating in a field of consciousness in some way.

I don't totally understand. He's a very interesting thinker. Yeah. And you know his son, Merlin? No. What a great name. You should get him on. Merlin?

He named his kids Merlin and Cosmo. Well, I've had him on. He was great. He was a fascinating guy. Merlin wrote a beautiful book called Entangled Life about fungi. He's a scientist. And it's all about the relations that fungi create among other species. Other than being a magician, what are your other choices for jobs?

Yeah, I know. That's right. Mycologist. Merlin. But what I love about psychedelics is they raise these questions of consciousness. You know, this thing we just take for granted. We have this everyday, ordinary consciousness. We don't think about it.

Right. And they kind of distance ourselves from it. And suddenly you're asking questions about consciousness. I've been really struck by how many neuroscientists got into their field because of psychedelic experience. That it suddenly made them think, hey, this is interesting, and we shouldn't assume what we assume. So I'm very interested in that whole conversation around neuroscientists and psychedelics. Well, I'm really interested in more people experiencing it that are these brilliant people that maybe have these- Can bring something to it so like dawkins has never had a psychedelic experience which to me is crazy

yeah i think he could use one yeah i think so i have a list of people who could use one but see i think this is this is another you know we talked about this efflorescence of art that may come out of this uncloseting of psychedelics. The other thing is getting really good scientific minds involved who haven't been, who've been afraid to. And, you know, there is this core of scientists, you've had some of them on the show, who've promoted psychedelic research, got it off the ground, you know, brilliant people like Roland Griffith and Matt Johnson at Hopkins and Charles Grobe at UCLA. But then there's this other kind of scientists who are not so much committed to psychedelics, but committed to understanding consciousness in the brain who have not had psychedelic experience

or haven't had the opportunity to do research on psychedelics. And now they want to. So at Berkeley, last year, we started a psychedelic science center to study psychedelics. And we're not going to be doing the kind of clinical research that people are doing at Hopkins and NYU, which is really important, but we don't have a medical school. We don't do medical research at Berkeley. We're going to be doing basic science. We're going to be trying to use psychedelics to understand real basics about how we construct visual perception, the mechanisms by way they work. And what's really struck me is that some really top-rate neuroscientists who've never touched psychedelics, well, they probably have in their lives, but not in their work,

are going to work on it and bring their tools and their analytical chops. And so I think we're going to learn a lot. And psychedelics is going to teach us things about consciousness, teach us things about how the brain constructs its picture of reality that we don't know now. So I think it's a really exciting initiative. I'm very excited about all this. it's a really exciting initiative. I'm very excited about all this and I think we have a unique opportunity to form an operating manual for how to use these things based on real science, based on people with experiences

with these psychedelic compounds, and also now I think more so than ever based on a real understanding of human psychology. Right. Right. And these things have never been really applied in a form where we have a possibility, specifically because of the work of MAPS and Doblin and some of the amazing people that he works with. We have a possibility of setting up centers. Yeah. Like real, legit places where people can go and have an actual way to get out of whatever mental funk they're in. And there's a real pathway. It's possible. It could help you.

Oh, without question. Look, we have a mental health crisis in this country, right? The numbers around depression and with the pandemic, it's gotten a lot worse. Anxiety, suicide. And one of the big surprises that I had after How to Change Your Mind came out, I expected a lot of pushback. I expected mainstream psychiatry, the American Psychological Association, all these kind of groups to like, well, psychedelics, very dangerous. We don't want to mess around. I had the opposite experience. They were so engaged. They would invite me to speak. They reached out to me. And I realized at a certain time, and it was actually talking to Tom Insel, a psychiatrist formerly head of the National Institute of Mental Health. And he said, well, you don't understand

how broken our field is, that we don't have good tools, that we're not healing people. We're helping with symptoms at best, and that we're desperate for new tools. And along comes this one, which has the potential not just to address symptoms, but to actually heal across many different mental disorders. And I think that that embrace, embrace may be too strong a word, but that openness to what psychedelics has to contribute is going to hasten its acceptance. You know, there are a lot of problems to work out. You know, it's a weird thing to fit into the system we have now. Is it a drug? Is it talk therapy? Well, it's a package of both because you really, it isn't just the psychedelic, right? It's psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy or therapy. So how do you do that? The FDA doesn't regulate therapy. So how do they attach the approval of psilocybin with the need for a guide and somebody to prepare you and help you integrate? There are a lot of really hard

questions to work out here, but your point about operating manuals is really right because I think the problem in our culture with psychedelics was that when they showed up, there was no instruction manual, right? And we did some really stupid things in the 60s. We would dose people without their permission. We put it in the punch bowl, LSD in the punch bowl. That's like unbelievably crazy and cruel. It was reckless. And a lot of people had great experiences anyway, but many people crashed and burned too. And now's the time to write that instruction manual. We have more experience and we're studying these indigenous cultures who have a lot to teach us about how to use them safely.

And that's a really interesting project. And it's, you know, and one of the things I'm trying to do with This Is Your Mind on Plants is start that post-drug war conversation about drugs, which is one of the reasons I included caffeine. You know, a totally illegal drug that everybody uses. What does that have to teach us? that everybody uses. What does that have to teach us? In a way, one of the most powerful drug experiences I've had in my life was the first cup of coffee after three months off.

Really? It was psychedelic. Really? It was incredible. Come on. Try it. Try getting off caffeine for a while. Three months?

Three months without caffeine. How am I going to do a podcast? You may have to take a hiatus. I'm going to run out of things to talk about. I'll fall asleep. It was really hard. I did it, actually. It's a suggestion of Roland Griffith,

the psychedelic researcher, who before that was the world's leading expert on caffeine. And I was interviewing him about caffeine for this chapter. And he said, well, you're never going to understand your relationship to caffeine until you get off it. So it was kind of a dare. And it was really hard. It was one of the hardest things I've done.

Really? I was a mess. For how long? Three months. You're a mess until you. I was functional after a month. The first week I was not functional at all. I felt like I had contracted ADD.

I could not stay on track. Everything, the periphery just kept intruding on my thinking. I couldn't write. I mean, writing is the most linear thing you can do, right? And it's all about concentration, obviously. And I couldn't concentrate. And I felt like there was this veil between me and reality that I was not quite seeing, getting, feeling. And it was weird. I didn't feel myself for the whole time. And I thought, what does that mean? It means yourself is caffeinated. And that is baseline consciousness for me and for many people. And that's not a bad thing, but I think we have a debt to these plants that we owe them. And so I spent a lot of time researching that

chapter, looking back in history for when caffeine enters the West. And it doesn't happen until the 1650s in Europe. So we actually have a before and after, which we don't with a lot of drugs because they just go back, you know, millennia. And before caffeine, it was a very different world and a very different consciousness. People were drunk a lot of the time, buzzed almost all of the time. People drank morning, noon, and night because it was safer than water. Water was really how you got diseases. If you fermented things, even low alcohol, it killed a lot of the microbes. So people, even kids, you gave your kids hard cider for breakfast. Wow.

And this was true in America up until the 1800s, up until Prohibition. But anyway, caffeine comes along in the 1650s, and tea and chocolate and coffee all arrive in the same decade in England, which is kind of like a great decade, right? And things start to change. In the form of coffee? Coffee and tea and chocolate, which also has caffeine in it. And so they had never experienced coffee before the 1600s?

That's right. They had in the Arab world. They'd had it from like 1200 or something like that. Supposedly it was discovered in 800s by a herder in like Ethiopia who noticed that his goats were getting very frisky when they ate this particular berry and would stay up all night. And so he, yeah, so he kind of started experimenting. He brought it to these monks, and they made a drink, and it was like, ooh. It makes sense that it was in the Arab world, because if you think about all the science that was being done in the Arab world,

all the literature back then, all the writing. The theory is that the Arab world had coffee first and had this incredible golden age. The Arab world had coffee first and had this incredible golden age. Yes. And there is a historian of psychoactives named Wolfgang Schivelbusch. And he correlates. What a name. Isn't that wonderful?

German, of course. Wolfgang Schivelbusch. It's a great book. It's called Tastes of Paradise. Highly recommend it. And he said this was the perfect drug for the culture that invented mathematics and had this incredible – and it helped the culture in two ways. One was as safe as alcohol made water, boiling it made it much safer. And coffee and tea, of course, both require boiling water. No one ate or drank boiling water or hot beverages before.

So this gave this incredible public health boost to these places. And then you have the drug that basically fosters a kind of more linear, rational, focused way of thinking. And so there is a lot of evidence linking coffee and tea consumption with the Enlightenment in France and with the Age of Reason in England. And people in the 1600s started writing about it. So like, wow, people, you know, we have this new civil and sober drink that we, and it was so popular because it was new that people drank less and they used more caffeine. And that I think makes possible things like the Industrial Revolution, because, you know, when you're doing physical labor outdoors, which was most of history, right, you could be buzzed.

You didn't have to know what time it was. You worked from sunup to sundown. There were beer breaks, actually, on farms in England. They would give you beer because it gave you calories and made you happy. and made you happy. But when you start moving into like running machines and doing double entry bookkeeping, you need a clearer head. And when you start moving toward night shifts and overnight shifts, you couldn't do that without caffeine. And that's when it begins. There's a whole new, like it freed us from the rhythms of the sun, which dictated everything in Western culture. You could only work till the sun went down.

So it had a profound effect on capitalism, the rise of capitalism. And the clearest illustration of that that I came across is the coffee break. Where did that come from? The coffee break actually has a history. We know the company that came up with it. And it was a necktie manufacturer in Denver called Wigwam Weavers. Really? And Wigwam Weavers made these very intricate silk neckties.

And during World War II, they lost all their best loom operators to the war effort. So they hired these old guys to do it, you know, who weren't getting drafted. And they couldn't do it very well. Then they hired these women to do it and they could do it beautifully. And there were very intricate patterns, very complicated looms. I mean, you've seen how they, you know, the patterns on neckties and the women could do it really well, but only for about four or five hours. So they called a meeting and the owners said to the workers, what could we do? We have to improve your efficiency and we need more output.

And the women said, well give us a coffee break. They didn't call it that initially. And give us some time at like 10 in the morning and four in the afternoon and give us some coffee and tea. So we started doing it and overnight, like their productivity and efficiency goes up. Quality control goes up. And so he institutes the coffee break.

And think about it. Your employer gives you a drug and then gives you time off in which to ingest it during the workday. Yeah. Why would they do that? Because it contributes mightily. So the coffee break might seem like it's something your boss is giving you, but it's a way to extract more value from you. And I'm sure employees that have little breaks and get to enjoy just a little bit of free time,

they'll be happier employees. They'll probably be more productive. Calling Mr. Bezos, man. He should institute. I don't know if he has coffee breaks. He wants you to be on Adderall 24-7 running to the next package. Tell me about your experience, what your experience was like with the three months off and then having the caffeine. So I had this three months that was really unpleasant. The only things that were positive about it was I slept like a teenager. It really did improve my sleep. I had some great sleeps like I remember from when I was a teenager, you know, when you can sleep 14 hours.

That was really good. I also felt, and I'm not proud of this, self-righteous. So, you know, and I remember one morning having to get a 6 a.m. flight. And I had to get up and get myself moving on mint tea. And I get to the airport. And it's just when they're opening the Pete's and the Starbucks. And the line is like snaking, you know, for those people getting on 6 a.m. flights. And I'm looking at these people. And know, for those people getting on 6 a.m. flights.

And I'm looking at these people and they look like junkies you see in Amsterdam. They look so pathetic. And, you know, that they were hooked and they needed their fix. And they look kind of miserable and withdrawal was starting. Because that first cup of coffee is not about the pleasure it gives us. It's really about stopping withdrawal symptoms, which are beginning overnight because we haven't had it for 24 hours. And I felt self-righteous. I'm not proud of that. And I knew that I was going to rejoin them as soon as I could.

Right. So when I hit the three-month mark, I decided, and I needed for the ending of the piece, to have a cup and see this was going to tell me, you know, because drugs are very different the first time you take them, right, before your body is accustomed to them. So I had this first cup, and I gave a lot of thought to where I would have it. I thought about the original Pete's is in my neighborhood, the very first Pete's. But I don't love their coffee. It can be kind of burnt tasting. And so I went to a place called the Cheese Board, which is a cafe bakery in my neighborhood.

And they have a little pocket park out on the street. And I got a cup, got a special, which is, it's sort of like a cappuccino, but more coffee and less milk, like a flat white in Australia. And we sat, my wife and I, Judith, sat there and I drank this drink and it was so good. I mean, I just felt these waves of well-being and then it turned into euphoria. And I was like, wow, this is such a strong drug. I had no idea. It was like cocaine or something. And that lasted for maybe 20 minutes. But then something turned that was kind of interesting. Across the street, there was a garbage truck that was grabbing hold of two plastic garbage cans and shaking them like

this and making this horrible racket. And it really got under my skin. I was getting kind of horrible racket. And it really got under my skin. I was getting kind of irritable. And I said to Judith, can we go home? And I felt like I got to get something done. I felt kind of compulsive. And so we walked home and I went to my office and I just had this desire to get shit done. And so what I did was, this is really weird. I unsubscribed from like 100 listservs that I was getting on my email that were really annoying. I just killed them one after another and after another. And then after I finished that, I went through the sweater in my closet, all the sweaters in my closet. And I threw out some. I gave some away.

This sounds like meth behavior. This is what I hear. I have a friend of mine I don't know data girl was on meth and she always would clean really come home and organize and clean things he's like so if your girl starts cleaning incessantly she might be on amphetamines yeah I was really compulsive uh and very productive and and I said to myself. Did you keep drinking it throughout the day? Well, this is, no, but I was tempted to. So I said to myself, how can I hold on to this power that this drug has? Because if I start using it every day, I'm going to lose it.

I'm just going to be another caffeine addict. And I came up with this idea. Only do it on Saturdays. Once a week. And I did that for a while. So that very day after cleaning out my closet, I worked in the garden and there were some plants that needed replacement. And so I started driving down to this garden center called Flowerland. And I realized, why did I pick that nursery? And said, oh, they have this Airstream where they sell espresso drinks right out in front. It was like it was the voice of the addict putting me in position to get another cup the same day.

And so I resisted that. And I did this Saturday thing for a while. And it worked pretty well. I really look forward to Saturdays. And I got a lot done. On Saturday. On Saturday. On Saturday. But I wasn't addicted anymore, so I could get through the week. It wasn't hard. But then gradually it was like, you know, it's Thursday and I got a deadline.

And this would really help me get over the deadline. So I started making exceptions. It was complete addict thinking, right? Did you try any other forms of caffeine? Yeah, I would do green tea as I'm drinking now. Green tea is a very good source of caffeine because it's really even. There's another alkaloid in it that stretches out the effect. So you don't get a jolt, but it kind of keeps you nicely titrated. What is the caffeine content of green tea, the average cup?

It's probably a third of what you get in a cup of coffee. It varies amazingly. Like if the tips were plucked, you know, when they're brand new, you know, first flush green tea, that has a lot more caffeine in it and is a lot more valuable. So there's a lot of variables that go into it. The plant is producing caffeine, of course, as a pesticide. Right. And that was a whole question I looked at. It's like, why do plants produce these things that have these effects on our minds? Isn't that amazing that a plant could devise a chemical that can unlock a receptor in your brain? That's astonishing. So I started looking at that question. And most of these alkaloids began as defenses. They're all very bitter, which is

discouraging to insects. And they fuck with their minds, basically. I mean, if you think about it, I always thought, well, if you're creating a pesticide, just make it lethal, right? But plants don't do that. That's not a great, I mean, some of them do. But if you think about it, if you put out a lethal pesticide and you kill whoever's eating you, whether it's a deer or a beetle, you're going to select for resistant members of the pest population. Natural selection will, you know, there'll be some that won't be affected and then they'll take over and then your pesticide no longer works. Much cleverer strategy is to just mess with their minds and ruin their appetites. And think about it. How hungry are you on psychedelics?

It's the last thing. It's the last thing you think about. So getting your pest to trip or and the other thing you do, if you let's say you're worried about insects. This is the plant's point of view right now. I'm going to give you a drug that makes you act really recklessly and dance around and lose control of your sense of survival. You're going to get picked off by a bird. So that's really clever. What made me realize this, and this is my theory. I don't have any science to point to, and I'm not a scientist. But I had a cat named Frank who had a problem with catnip. And I mean, I shouldn't say it was a problem. He loved catnip. But he had to

have some every day. And I had this, we used to live in rural Connecticut, and I had this fenced-in vegetable garden. And every evening in the summer, I'd go down to harvest some lettuce or food for dinner, and Frank would follow me into the garden and look up at me. And the reason he was looking at me is he'd forgotten where the catnip was. It was in this garden. He was there every day. He would go over. He'd have some catnip, get really fucked up, and roll in the dirt for a while, and then go back to the house. What does catnip do to a cat?

It's got a chemical that's very close to a sex hormone and that it has this psychoactive effect on cats. It doesn't work on anybody else. effect on cats. It doesn't work on anybody else. But it made me realize that how clever this plant was to make its pest, which the cat was, forget where it was. And a lot of drugs make us forgetful. Cannabis is a great example. Cannabis may work by making its pests forget where they saw it or tasted it. So anyway, this idea that plants have developed really neurochemistry to mess with our minds is a product of evolution, and it's an amazing skill. And the fact that these pesticides turn into attractants that at high doses create problems, at low doses do these interesting things in our minds,

has also been an evolutionary strategy because look what we've done with coffee and tea. We've spread their seeds all over the world. We've made them precious commodities or cannabis. I mean, these plants were stuck in their little center of origin. Now they're everywhere. So this dance of plant chemicals in human brains has been very much to the advantage of both parties, I think.

And it's quite an astonishing fact of evolution that plants should have figured out how to mess with our minds to the extent that they have. How much have you studied when plants change their flavor profile because they're aware that other plants near them are being eaten? Right. Yeah, I have looked at that. It's really amazing. So in a forest, say oak trees, if they're being beset by some caterpillar or something, it'll usually start on the edges. And those plants will send signals through the air and alert other members, other oak trees, to actually start producing these defense chemicals, alkaloids, that have bad taste and

ruin the taste for the pest. There's a lot of communication that goes on among plants. It goes on through the air with these volatiles, and then it goes on under the ground. And this is where the mycelium are connecting trees in a forest. Suzanne Simard just wrote this really interesting book about this called Searching for the Mother Tree. She's an arborist or a forest scientist in British Columbia. And she has shown how the trees in a forest are actually connected by these threads of mycelium. And the trees can use that passageway to send nutrients to other trees. So a mother tree can take care of baby trees and actually send carbon through this network. And even two species of different trees can swap nutrients. So a deciduous tree that loses all its leaves needs maximum nutrients in the spring to get started.

And it can borrow from the bank of an evergreen tree. And so there's this whole communications network going on underground that she showed. showed. And she did it by, she'd give radioactive isotopes to one tree and watch sugar, you know, with a radioactive isotope and follow it with a Geiger counter through the forest and follow the trail. Wow. So I've written about plant intelligence before. I did a piece on it for the New Yorker several years ago. If you search the intelligent plant, it comes up. And I got a new respect for how clever plants are. I mean, they're geniuses in their own way. You know, we got good at language and consciousness and art. We do all these cool and tool making. And we think that's the height of evolution.

That whole time, actually longer, because they've been around longer than we have, they were working on biochemistry. And they are the masters of biochemistry. We cannot produce drugs as good as what plants can produce. We cannot produce drugs as good as what plants can produce. We cannot produce psychoactives as good as what plants can produce. Yeah. I don't think we think of them as intelligent because they're not mobile. That's right. It's just a limitation of our own biology, the way we perceive things. Exactly. No, we think, I mean, our standards for what constitutes intelligence are based on us,

but there are other ways to be intelligent. If you define intelligence as the ability to solve the problems that confront you in life, they're really intelligent. Or communication. Yeah. Because they clearly communicate. They communicate in many different ways. And they send signals when they're being preyed upon. Yeah.

And not just signals in terms of, like you were saying, they send them through the air. There's also studies that they've done where they've played sounds of caterpillars chewing leaves next to plants. Yes, I know the guy who does that work, yeah. Which is even more insane. So somehow or another they can hear. And they can recognize a very specific pattern. So they hear the sounds of the caterpillar. Just a recording.

So it's not a real, this is where it gets really crazy. It's not real caterpillars actually eating real leaves where the trees are communicating through the mycelium. It's a sound. And they're like, oh, we know what this is. Trouble. And then they send the change. And they produce this chemical. Yeah, which is wild.

I know. I know. Well, the reason that plants got so good at this is because they couldn't move, right? If you can't run away and if you can't go to what you want, you have to make it come to you or repel it. And that's all chemistry. And so that's where all their ingenuity went. And it's just a limitation of our imagination that we can't see this. Although if you've ever looked at time-lapse of plants, you suddenly get an appreciation for them as active agents. Um, there was a, um, when I was doing the intelligent plant, the scientist in Italy showed me this, um,

video of two beans competing for a steak and, um, and it was in time-lapse and you see them and they're like fighting with each other and they're going like this and then one of them wins and the other one gets limp and just depressed and you see them as personalities you know with life experiences successes and failures in a way you never do it's just a timeline issue it is we live in a dimension a very specific dimension of time and other creatures live in different dimensions of time and you know so we need to be able to imagine these other dimensions but the tool of time and other creatures live in different dimensions of time. And, you know, so we need to be able to imagine these other dimensions, but the tool of time-lapse photography is a powerful one for showing this. David Attenborough did a secret life of plants kind of show once where he did tons of time-lapse and suddenly, you know, you've seen the ones of the

Venus fly traps and stuff like that, but suddenly you, you realize, oh, they're thinking and they're not thinking the way we think, but they do think, I mean, they, and you know, there has been research also showing that they can learn. There's a woman named Monica Gagliano, who's a botanist, who's done really cool experiments with sensitive plants. You know, the sensitive plants that looks like a fern and you touch it and it goes limp. And it does this whenever it's touched. And she would take a bunch of sensitive plants and drop them a couple inches in their pots. And at first, they thought that drop was a touch and they would shrink down, collapse. And then after she did it five or six times, they realized it was a false signal and they stopped doing it.

And they permanently learned not to respond to that. So how are they remembering that? Where do they store that information? Oh my God. It's pretty mind-blowing. That is so wild. Yeah. So there are other ways to be on this planet, right, than the way animals do it.

And plants deserve our respect. And that's why I've spent so many decades thinking about them and writing about them and growing them. There's a relationship that we have with them, too, where they change your perception. There's a relationship that we have with them, too, where they change your perception. Like if I go outside and I see trees and everything's green and lush, I have a feeling. A feeling like hits you where whatever it is that is about being a person, when a person is around something that's like green and vivid, I guess it represents life yeah i guess it represents just gonna say that bounty potential food health yes you're and you gravitate towards that and i feel like that's how people are with forests yeah you know and treat you see all these trees and there's a feeling you get when you're in you know air quotes nature right you go out there and it's like ah

like it's a nourishing feeling. I know. Your body has a great reaction to it. Yeah. I mean, I think we're wired for it. And I think it connotes a sense of health. And, you know, when nature is healthy, there's probably food to be found, you know, that all these trees are producing things you might eat. And I'm very interested in this forest bathing movement, you know, where people go into the forest and just kind of meditate there. And it's a powerful experience. So yeah, plants are amazing. One more example. So caffeine, you know, I said is a pesticide. Yes. They recently discovered this really surprising kind of anomaly,

which is that there are certain kinds of plants that produce caffeine in their nectar. Now, nectar is an attractant, right? You want it to taste good and you want it to draw things to you because you want your pollinators to show up. So why would you put a pesticide in your nectar? Well, it's in such tiny quantities that bees really like it. And it turns out that bees are attracted to caffeine the way we are. And that they will, this woman named Geraldine Wright, an American working in England,

did this study. And she found that bees will prefer plants that give them caffeine. and she found that bees will prefer plants that give them caffeine. And they will remember those plants more. They'll be more likely to remember those plants and go back to them. And they will be more faithful pollinators of that plant. So, which is suggesting that basically the plant is using caffeine the way we do. I mean, to get better work out of its pollinators. I mean, in a way, it's sort of like the coffee break story.

Jamie, we talked about this before, and I never did anything about it. How do I get a hold of that mad honey? Well, we can just buy it. You can buy that psychedelic honey? Yeah. You know about the psychedelic honey? Uh-uh. Is it in Tibet?

Nepal. Nepal. Nepal. There's a psychedelic honey that's very difficult to obtain. These bees grow it on the side of cliffs. And so these people, they have this perilous route where they have to like dangle off the side of the cliff in a rope to gather up this. Look at this. This is this psychedelic honey.

And this psychedelic honey, as they're gathering this stuff up, apparently it's phenomenal stuff that makes you trip balls. So what's the plant that they're getting the pollen and nectar from? I was hoping you knew. That's it right there. I mean, this guy is just hanging on to it. We should start with the plant. Mad honey, the hallucinogenic honey that can sell for over $60 a pound

on the black market. Yeah, let's find out what they do. I'm sure you can get it on Amazon. hallucinogenic honey that can sell for over $60 a pound on the black market. Yeah, let's find out what they do. I'm sure you can get it on Amazon. So this mad, I think you can. This is all the stuff. This is mad honey. We need to do it and see what it does.

What does it say? It says 300 grams of it, but it doesn't say. What is the most potent mad honey available? Why don't you Google what is the psychoactive component of mad honey? What's the alkaloid in mad honey? What a great name, by the way, mad honey. I know. It should be a band. There it is.

It's an alkaloid. Here it is. Okay. Bees that collect pollen and nectar from gray anotoxin. Gray anotoxin-containing plants. Often produce honey that also contains gray anotoxins. So-called mad honey is the most common use of gray anotoxin poisoning in humans. Poisoning?

How dare you? Well, it's about dose, right? Yes. I mean, like all drugs. Mad honey in Turkey is known as deli bal. It's also used as a recreational drug in traditional medicine. Rhododendrons. Wow.

So it's made by bees that feed on rhododendron flowers, which give it psychoactive effects. But again, it's one of those things where I think it's only in Nepal where they find this stuff and harvest this stuff. But rhododendrons are here. Yeah. So if you put some bee boxes in a rhododendrons are here. Yeah, you could yeah, so if you put some bee boxes in a rhododendron nursery, you could try that. See if you can find a video on it because when you watch these guys collect it, it is

wild. Yeah, well it must be worth it. It must be worth it but how did they ever figure this out? Because it's on the side of cliffs. I know. They have to literally risk their life and dangle off cliffs and you gotta assume they're doing this with like, I mean, how long have they been doing it? Did they start with homemade ropes?

You've got to really trust a rope maker. Well, the lengths people go to collect honey, I mean, we did a documentary based on Cooked. Based on Cooked? Cooked was a book I wrote a few years ago about cooking and the cooking hypothesis. And we went to Africa to shoot it. I didn't cooking hypothesis. And we went to Africa to shoot it. I didn't go, but the crew went to Africa to shoot it. And the hunt for honey is like more prestigious than the hunt for animals. And people, and they would send these young boys up, you know,

it's ridiculously high trees to get it. I mean, look, you know, sweetness is a driver for human society, right? We do a lot for sugar. I mean, we started the slave trade for sugar, right? I mean, it was insane what we would do to get sugar. They started the slave trade for sugar? Slave trade began with sugar plantations in the Caribbean. And yeah, and so sugar and the sugar trade was driven in large part by the tea trade because the English would put so much sugar in their tea. That's the way they, because they had kind of very bitter tea.

So, and it became a big source of calories in the English diet is the sugar you would put in your tea. And because it was hot water, it could absorb a lot more sugar. So anyway, the dark side of coffee and tea is these industries are built on the back of incredible exploitation, slavery. And, I mean, just, you know, the people who grow our caffeine historically have been treated really badly.

Well, historically, whenever there's been a commodity, people have always abused other people in order to either harness that commodity, achieve it. Like salt. Like how many wars were – how many people were murdered for salt yeah that was true sounds insane because you go to the store or in the spice trade yeah it's right there or you go to a diner it's on the table it's like well once upon a time it was really it's rare in nature that's one of the reasons we love it it's those things that are rare in nature salt sugar fat and that's why we crave them because they were special occasions and now we can get them of course anytime we want and you can get them all in one source and that's why we crave them because they were special occasions and now we can get them of course anytime we want.

And you can get them all in one source and that's why we're so fat. The rhododendron is the national flower of Nepal. The hills and mountainside ranges of Nepal are decorated with different colors and shapes. The genus and species which is the dark red color in rhododendron arboreum which is called the laligurans in Nepali. So there's over 1,000 different kinds of rhododendron, though. Oh, wow. And they also grow.

You can get mad honey from the Pacific Northwest. Oh, really? According to this article. See if you can get a video of them collecting the mad honey, though, because the video is wild. When you see these guys swarmed by bees trying to harvest these and they're very strange looking honeycombs yeah they don't look neat or organized they're tripping balls while they're making them and you wonder what effect it's having on the bees i'll bet nobody's studied

that yes right that's the same way we figured out that they like caffeine. They may like this stuff. Yeah, so these guys have a ladder. And they send this rope ladder off the top of a cliff. And as they're climbing down, I mean, it is just the possibility of death is always there. Yeah, and look at the swarms of bees. So they cut the nest off and they attach it to a rope and they slowly lower it down. Why isn't this guy being stung to death?

I think he is. He's being stung like crazy for sure. I think they just develop an ability to tolerate. Well, it looks like they're putting smoke into them. Oh, look at the thing he's wearing. Well, either way, he's getting lit up, let's be honest. There's no way he's going to get through this without any stings.

They're probably trying to mitigate the amount of stings. But yeah, they are using smoke, just like a normal beekeeper would do. Look how they're doing it, though. This is wild, man. I wonder if he's bringing embers with him. He must be. It doesn't seem like he has anything on him, but God, this is so risky. He's hanging off of that thing.

Look at the dude up there holding on to the rod i don't trust that motherfucker jesus christ these people are this is risking so much i know it's why it's so crazy look at the guy on the top he's literally holding the rope that is helping this guy oh my god it's so crazy and now he's gonna raise up the honey and the ladder's just tied to a tree or something. That ladder doesn't inspire confidence. Oh, it looks like terrible ladders. Yeah, and if you fall, you're fucked.

And I bet a lot of people fall. Really amazing. So you think this is being driven by the desire for the honey or the money that you can get for the honey, I wonder. Well, now I'm probably sure. It's the money. Yeah, but I bet initially the way they found out about it was the honey. Yeah, and they were using it.

See, and these guys are eating it. Oh, they're chomping down on it. And, you know, honey and honeycombs, there's a lot of nutrients in that as well. Look in there, eating the pollen. They don't seem to be tripping. Or maybe they are. Give them 20 minutes. Look how cool those honeycombs look too.

Like really strange looking. Strange looking hives. You know, they're not. You can see though they're not very neat, which suggests maybe it is psychoactive on the bees. Yeah. Have you ever seen those experiments NASA did giving spiders various drugs to see what their webs would look like?

No. Oh, I did see that, but I don't remember that. Yeah. So they gave LSD. They gave acid, yeah. But the weirdest, worst one was caffeine. Really? Yeah.

What did they do? Look at the NASA spider web caffeine. Was it all just murderous? It was just a mess. It was like there were holes that a bug could get through. Oh, wow. So look. Normal.

Marijuana looks like a guy telling you a stoned idea. Benzedrine looks similar to marijuana. But look at caffeine. It's complete chaos. Yeah. What's chloral hydrate? I don't know. Whatever it is that's complete chaos. Yeah. What's chloral hydrate? I don't know. Whatever it is, it makes you lazy.

Anyway, that's a really weird, I don't see the LSD one, but that's very strange. And so that suggests that caffeine is disordering the minds of the insects that eat it. Well, it kills dogs. Caffeine does? Yeah. That's why you can't give a dog chocolate. It's the caffeine. Yeah. Well, it kills dogs. Caffeine does? Yeah. If they- That's why you can't give a dog chocolate. It's the caffeine.

Yeah. I did not know that. I thought it was something else. Yeah. I mean, it takes quite a bit. Yeah. But if you give a dog chocolate- Yeah, I've heard you never should do that,

but I didn't know that. That's why. Yeah. Yeah, it's caffeine. It really fucks dogs up. Caffeine is a strong chemical. I mean, I think we don't really appreciate it. But we never think of coffee, excuse me, of chocolate as being a significant.

No, it's not a great quantity of caffeine. It's enough to kill a dog. Yeah. I'm surprised. Maybe there's something else. Maybe I've been misled. There are a few other alkaloids in chocolate, but I don't know. I haven't studied it that closely.

But yeah, other animals are not really big on caffeine. No. It's a human thing for the most part. We figured out how to use it. Yeah. And you know,

the dose makes the poison as they say. So the same thing that can be, I mean, this is a key thing to understand about all drugs.

You know, the Greeks had this word for them, they called them pharmakon and that word meant both blessing and curse.

Really? And they could hold these two conflicting ideas in their head and we have to do the same thing. We have to realize that, you to realize that these drugs are powerful. They're tools and they can be used well or used badly.

And a lot of the work of culture is figuring out which and how. Yeah, it seems like we're just learning over the last few decades about the – I don't want to call it consciousness, about the intelligence of plants. I mean, would you call it consciousness? How would you? No, I don't think I would. I mean, I'm more comfortable with intelligence. I mean, maybe we'll find there's something like consciousness,

but consciousness implies a self-awareness and an eye, a perceiving eye. So let's call it intelligence. So this wasn't even a concept a few decades. When was the concept of plant intelligence? When did it first emerge in the literature? Well, there was a group that got started in the early aughts called the Institute or Center for Plant Neurobiology. It was a very aggressive name because there are no neurons. And it pissed off so many botanists. And this is a group of people, Stefano Monchuzo is involved, Monica Gagliano,

a handful of others. I wrote this piece about them years ago. And this is when you first started getting a lot of research into plant communication, plant problem solving. You know, they were working with these, what is the creature? There's a slime mold that can navigate a labyrinth. Okay. Really? Yeah. So that's not, that's not a plant, obviously that's a fungus. But yeah, they would put food here and a mold here, the slime mold that kind of grows in this. How long would it take? I don't know. I didn't stick around to watch it. Wow. But so I would date it to 2000 or so when you get a lot more attention. There was that book written in the 70s. I don't even remember the secret life of plants and that where they were using plants as lie detectors. They would bring criminals in to

see if they got an electrical response. It was all bullshit. I mean, that book has been completely discredited. And that slowed down research into plant intelligence. It was interesting. Nobody wanted to touch it when that book was exposed. But now it's kind of coming back and it's a respectable subject. And I think we're going to learn a lot more in the next few years. Is there real data on using music and talking to plants and the change that it has in the way they grow? Not that I know of. Not real data. That was part of the secret life of plants. Oh, was it?

Yeah. If you played Beethoven or Mozart, they had preferences. I wonder if there's something to that, though. They don't like to be touched. Most plants would rather you didn't touch them. Oh, interesting. They take it as a threat. Right.

But maybe like the dropping ferns, maybe they get accustomed to it. Maybe they get used to it if you pet your rhododendron. Or if you touch them when you spray them with mist and water and moisten them. Or associate it with fertilizer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I wonder if that's possible, like a Pavlov's dog type situation. Yeah, that's a good question. That'd be wild.

It would be. But we've also learned, though, that they are not solitary creatures. I mean, as we're learning, we're not solitary creatures. It's so interesting that we now know that plants that have a symbiotic relationship with fungus do much better. fungus do much better. And if you put them in like, I don't know, you know, just water, you know, you grow them hydroponically or grow them in a sterile soil, they will never do as well as plants that grow with fungus. And there's a wonderful relationship between the mushrooms and the plants where the plants produce sugars that they exude from their roots that the fungus needs. And in exchange, the fungus, which can go down and burrow through rock and stuff like that, those little mycelium are

incredibly strong, they give minerals to the plant. And so they have this swap. And when you hear about using plants to sequester carbon in the soil, which is a big conversation around climate change, we think, oh, you're growing trees and that holds a lot of carbon. But in fact, what's happening is about 40% of the sugars that are produced during photosynthesis go down through the plant into the roots and out into the soil. They're giving it away. And that carbon goes into the soil food chain and gets eaten by various microbes and mycelium and stays in the soil in the form of the dead bodies of all those microbes. And that's how you can sequester large amounts of carbon by growing the right crops. So they're somehow another sharing or giving.

It's a more cooperative relationship. You know, we learned the original take on Darwin was nature, red tooth and claw, even though that wasn't his phrase, and that it was all about competition. But science of the last 50 years or so keeps finding more evidence for cooperation as being key in evolution, taking care of your kin but also your community. And so now we've seen this on the individual plant being dependent on a fungus. And now we're seeing in the forest that all these trees have a social life, essentially. They're all connected to one another. So it's not every plant for itself. In the same way, it isn't really any person for itself right we are fundamentally social

beings we do not do well alone and and so I think that the role of cooperation in nature is is finally getting the attention it deserves is there a way to measure like the health of a plant that is potted alone versus the health of a plant that is out in nature in a garden. Like, I wonder if a plant that's in a pot is similar to like a polar bear that's at the zoo. Like, yeah, it's alive, but it's not supposed to be there trapped like that. I could imagine an experiment where you'd get at that, which is keep a potted plant in the same environment as you have a plant growing in the garden. I mean, I have both potted plants and then plants that are in my garden.

And my sense is the ones in the garden do a lot better. They're more likely to get whatever they need because they can put their roots where they want. They're not limited. I wonder if there's a communication issue going on too, because if the mycelium is really somehow or another facilitating communication between all of these plants and there's some sort of a network that's going on. It's broken by the pot itself. Yeah. They're not getting through the pot.

So it's like, again, like a polar bear in a zoo. Yeah. Yeah. It's alive. You familiar with the rat park experiments? Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

It reminds me of that. Please talk about those because it's really amazing because people have this perception about rats and cocaine and rats and heroin and because of this. So most of what we think we know about drugs and addiction comes from these rat experiments, right? And they would take a caged rat, and this went on all through the 60s, 70s, 80s, and they would give it a choice. And it was hooked up with IVs and they could press a lever and get either sucrose, sugar, which was a nutrient, or they could get a drug. They could get cocaine or heroin or meth, whatever you put in there. And these caged rats would just keep hitting the lever for the cocaine or heroin until they died or got addicted. The cocaine killed them and the

opiates addicted them. And this was like proof that, you know, the chemicals have these hooks. And if you take, you know, that addiction's a disease, you catch from these chemicals, basically. That was the model. And then this clever psychologist named Bruce Alexander up in British Columbia thought, well, maybe it's because these rats have such shitty lives that they're taking these drugs. So he designed another experiment called the Rat Park. And he built a bigger cage. And he put toys in it and plants and other rats to, you know, to have sex with or play with and really good food, and then gave them a choice between water laced with morphine and clean water. They would still have a little morphine, but instead of like 25 milligrams, they'd have five milligrams. You know,

they'd have a safe amount, basically. And this was a really strong evidence for the fact that addiction is an adaptation to conditions, to the quality of your cage, if you will. And that if you could improve people's circumstances, if you could create a park for them or something like a park, they would be much less likely to get addicted. And I think that's a really telling example. I mean, it was just our blindness that we just assume rats in cages, natural, you know, but I mean, they were in solitary confinement. Yeah. They were miserable. They were probably suicidal. It makes sense with people. You don't see people at the top of their life that are doing fantastic,

that wasted all away with drugs. It's usually there's some sort of depression and some abuse or anxiety. Yeah, well like we were saying earlier about the opioid crisis, it's not everywhere. It's in these really disadvantaged areas. These areas that were once doing well and no longer are. And people's sense of their life prospects are so dim that, and as Carl Hart makes the point, they

do get pleasure from these drugs. Yes. They get something they're not getting in their life. Right. That there is this sense of warmth and comfort and even connectedness for some people. And, you know, it's not a healthy adaptation, but it is an adaptation. And so it raises questions on whether we should think about addiction as a disease. That's a very common idea. And it's useful in the sense that it takes away the shame.

And that's a healthy thing, I think, the shame of being addicted or the guilt of being addicted. But I think it may get things wrong, too, because it may be that the addiction is more of a symptom of the disease. And the disease may be trauma, poverty, racial discrimination. I mean, all the stresses that people deal with. That's Gabor Monte's take. Yeah, trauma in his take. And I think he makes a very good case. If you interview addicts, you will often find that there is some trauma in their past.

Yeah, it's an interesting—the Rat Park study is so interesting because imagine if that guy had not put those two pieces together. We would still have this narrative that cocaine and heroin are so addictive because of science that we've proven that people that get it, they just take it until their life falls apart. So keep it out of your life. Yeah, exactly. And then it's all biology and it's predestined and inevitable. And I think addiction is a lot more complicated. And I think, you know, some of these harm reduction strategies going on in Portugal and Switzerland is an interesting case. If you're a heroin addict there and you enter into their system, they will write you a prescription for heroin. So you'll get it at the drugstore, which removes the risk of overdose because you know what you're getting. There's not going to be any fentanyl in it, and you're not going to be using a dirty needle. So you're not going to have the contamination issues. I mean, a lot of the harms of using these drugs come from the fact they're illegal

and the black market and sharing needles and everything. And then they'll go to work on making sure you have a good job, giving you therapy, essentially improving your cage. giving you therapy, essentially improving your cage. And then they try to get you off the drug. But they realize they have to get the life circumstance right before you can attack the problem. The only way we're gonna figure out how to do that here is to make it super profitable. Yeah, yeah, good luck.

I mean, right? We're so hell bent on profit, and so hell bentbent on capitalism. And we're such moralists, too. The idea that we would reward addicts by improving their lives, giving them good jobs while we gave them a prescription. I don't see Americans sitting for that idea. Well, think of the self-righteousness you had walking through the airport with no caffeine in your system. Touche. It's like everybody has that.

We do. Fucking losers hooked on drugs. yeah. It's like everybody has that. We do. Fucking losers hooked on drugs. Yeah. Get your shit together like me. But the thing is, everybody's path is different. Everyone's path is different, but we do moralize drug addiction

in a way that just is not helpful. No, it's not. And we also, we lose sight of the big picture, like all these America First people, these hard-nosed sort of people that think that we need to just – people need to pull themselves up by the bootstraps and we need to emphasize hard work and discipline. All that stuff is great. The more people that can get out of this trap, the more people we can educate and provide therapy and provide a helping hand, the more they can get out of that, the less losers we'll have, which means the better America will be overall. And more people who are contributing.

We'll have more people contributing and more competition. More competition amongst us, which will elevate everybody. It's good for everybody. The people that are competitive, capitalistic people should be embracing this because it's better for the market overall. You'll have more contributors. Right. And more consumers. Yes. Yeah.

No, I think. And less crime. Yeah. Well, that's a big thing. Yes. And of course, you know, so much crime is the result of drugs being illegal. Right. And all we're doing are feeding the cartels. Yes. Which is insane. I

mean, everyone wants to go overseas to deal with these these criminals, you know, and these foreign lands that are doing terrible things. Oh, look what the drug war has done to Mexico. Look what it's done to Colombia. I mean, it's it's just destroyed these governments. And yeah, anyway, there are a lot of reasons to end the drug war. I think people see it. I don't see the right even defending it anymore. And it's, you know, one of the things I'm trying to do with this work and this book is let's start this post-drug war conversation and figure out a better way to deal with it. Because addiction will always be with us.

There will still be overdoses. You know, look, we legalize tobacco and alcohol, and I think about 80,000 people die from alcohol every year. And that's a cost that we've just decided we're going to bear as a society. We do our best with these rituals. And caffeine, we're kind of de-socializing the use of caffeine in a way that is lowering the number of people smoking, and that's been helpful. But this has to happen in the culture, and it's not going to be perfect. It's going to be an uneasy piece. Well, there's also personal responsibility and choice. Cigarettes are a big one, right? Cigarettes kill a half a million people every year in this country. They die prematurely because of

the use of cigarettes. But, you know, that's a, I'd say cigarettes are really, or tobacco is a very interesting example of how contextual though drug use is. So I have, in this book, I did a tobacco ceremony, which is really interesting. You know, many traditional cultures in the New World use tobacco as a sacred plant medicine. Some people think it's the most powerful plant medicine of all. They don't smoke them every day. They use them ceremonially on special occasions. They're not addicted to it.

And it's a powerful drug when used that way. So this tobacco ceremony, I was working with this healer, this curandera. And basically, it's liquefied tobacco. They take a tobacco rustica, which grows in South America, I guess. And they make this brown liquid from it. I don't know how they cook it. I don't know how they make it. And you close one nostril, and she has a syringe, and she shoots it up the other nostril. Whoa.

And it is, so it's like a snuff. And you just feel this wave of flame, like starting in your forehead and then moving back through your head and then down your spine. It's like, whoa. And you start moving in this involuntary way and shaking out your legs and your arms. You look kind of spastic. I did this in front of a camera. I regret to say. And I'm working on a documentary about psychedelics, but we can't, I'm not going to trip on camera. It's just too dangerous and bad idea. So, but a tobacco ceremony we could do because it's legal. It's totally legal. And it only lasts about 10 or 20 minutes, but it is such

a powerful purgative. Like I just felt like emptied out and refreshed when it was over. Really? And it's just like everything just went, whatever I was worrying about, whatever was on my mind. And I felt like physically that I had just been purged. And this is tobacco. This is the same drug that kills 500,000 people that, you know, millions of us are addicted to, and it's done so much damage. But that was how Westerners took this plant when they got to the New World, and they turned it into cigarettes, and they decided to smoke it rather than use it the way the indigenous people could have taught them to use it. But the indigenous people also had a pipe, right? Is that post-colonization?

That's a good question. I don't know when they started smoking the peace pipe and the use of it by Native Americans. I don't know that history at all. But even then, I think it was an occasion. It was not a habit, a daily habit. And there you have the example of a drug leaving a social context and then becoming highly individualized where you're alone with this thing and you're smoking all your body is telling you to smoke. And the idea that, and I was so negative on this idea of doing a tobacco ceremony. I mean, I smoked when I was younger and it was really hard to quit and I'm really happy I quit. And then I didn't want to go near it. And the smell of tobacco, you know, I have negative associations.

And, in fact, the worst thing in this experience was a little bit of it got down my nasal passages, and I swallowed it, and I felt like I had swallowed the contents of an ashtray. It was really nasty. And that lasted all night. But that was my mistake. I should not have swallowed. But it really taught me that set

and setting, you know, it's not just about psychedelics. It's about all drugs and that even a drug we regard as evil as tobacco in the proper context could be very positive. I think tobacco, the real issue is people smoking it all the time. And the real issue is the fact that it causes lung cancer and all these different things. But tobacco itself, like I've smoked cigarettes before shows and I like to do it. I like to smoke a cigarette before a show. It sparks my brain. Yeah.

And it is. Like caffeine, it does some very positive things for your cognition. Yeah. It gives you a weird head rush, like a very unusual head rush. If you're not using it habitually. Yes. If you're not using it habitually. Yes, if you're not using it habitually. Yeah. Yeah, I don't think it gives that head rush to people that are constantly on it.

But I know a lot of writers that have had a real problem quitting. When I quit, I had to relearn how to write. It involved a lot of coffee and sucking on, sucking candies and all sorts of other oral fixations. Different nicotine candies? No, I never did that. That wasn't really in use then. But an interesting fact about that is that you would think if it was strictly a chemical addiction to nicotine, that patches would work. And they only work for 17% of people. So that means that you have all these other people,

a majority of tobacco users, that it isn't just about the drug. It's about the experience, the association, the feeling. I don't know. I mean, they're getting their nicotine, but they still want their cigarettes. And that's an interesting finding because if addiction was all about the molecule, it should work 90% of the time. Yeah. Another thing that doesn't work that good is chew like yeah nicotine gum yeah yeah well not just gums but the like chewing tobacco and the stuff they put what's that shit called what they

call a dip dip a friend of mine gave me one of these little packets you put a packet like a tea bag yeah at least a little tea bag it was fucking disgusting it made me nauseous. I got nervous. I was like, bro, what is this? Well, people do get oral cancers from those things. Oh, I'm sure. Yeah.

No, I knew there was a documentary about a guy who was traveling around to all these different schools because he had had extreme facial cancer. Really? And he wanted to show it to kids. He had part of his tongue removed removed part of his jaw removed and he was like this handsome strapping guy and then you know was disfigured afterwards because it's like literally they had to remove a bunch of his bone for his jaw and sigmund freud that happened to him did it really yeah he had jaw cancer and it was just the last i don't know how many years

of his life and had a big piece of his jaw removed what did uh what did he was he smoking yeah he was a big um uh well the classic him in the pipe pipe yeah yeah there's so many of those intellectuals from that day like bertrand russell was a gigantic pipe i think it was de rigueur if you were like an academic of a certain generation yeah that you had to smoke a pipe or you wouldn't be taken seriously. Yeah. But it's less cancerous as are cigars, less cancerous than cigarettes. Yeah. But probably because you're just not taking in the same amount of chemical. Well, yeah, you're not inhaling as much. Yeah. And then less likely to get lung cancer. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, it's, um, it's just more fascinating and complicated than we think. But as a writer, I love moving toward the ambiguities, moving toward the uncertainties. And this idea that you have to be able to hold these contradictory ideas in your head is something I'm always trying to teach in my writing.

Was there anything in studying this book and preparing to do this book, was there anything that was surprising to you about what you learned? There were a lot of things that were surprising. Well, one, that bees like caffeine. Yeah, that's pretty crazy. And it improves their memory. And it does improve our memory, by the way. If you study, if you learn a subject or study something and then have a cup of coffee or tea after, you're more likely to remember it. So there's a reason to use it in college.

One of the most surprising facts is that the largest source of antioxidants in the American diet comes from coffee and tea. Really? In the American diet? American diet. That just tells you how few vegetables we're eating. That's just a measure of And the American diet. American diet. That just tells you how few vegetables we're eating. Right. And that's just a measure of how bad our diet is. We're eating meat and sugar, and we're just not getting plants.

Because the only thing that produces antioxidants, which we need for our health, which we need to prevent cancer, plants produce antioxidants. And so we're getting a lot of them from coffee and tea. produce antioxidants. And so we're getting a lot of them from coffee and tea. That may explain a lot of the health benefits of coffee and tea. Coffee has been shown to be protective against several cancers, against Parkinson's disease, against cardiovascular problems. And it may not be the caffeine. It may be the antioxidants. Wow. So that was a big surprise. How much antioxidants are in coffee? I mean, I know there's resveratrol that's in wine. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know how many or which ones, but it is the biggest source. And so if you're not eating vegetables,

you should, you know, bottoms up on your coffee. That's pretty crazy. Yeah, it is. I mean, we should probably be getting them from plants, eating plants. Or at least supplementing. Yeah. I just imagine that whatever you're getting from coffee, it's just a little bean. Yeah. I know. I know that it has so much. And you're not getting the leaves.

And there are antioxidants you get from the leaves of plants. Of course, you get that in tea. Right. So with tea, you're drinking the leaves. And with coffee, it's the seed. Has this book affected the way you eat or affected the way you think about what you eat? Because you're talking about all the positive and negative benefits of plants, all the compounds. Well, I'm pretty much down to a plant-based diet at this point.

I have a little bit of fish from time to time. I haven't had meat in two years, probably. What made you make that decision? It was a combination of health. I was dealing with some health issues and also what I was learning about the meat industry, which I've done a lot of writing on the cattle industry and pork, and I've worked on documentaries about that. And it's just a hard industry to support. I mean, it's just so brutal, both to the workers and the animals, that I don't really want to have anything to do with it. There are farmers growing meat in really sustainable ways, animals that have good lives on farms and one bad day, as they say.

And I support that kind of agriculture. But in general, the average meat you find comes at the end of a food chain I just don't want to support. And then the third reason is climate change. I've learned a lot about how our dietary choices affect the climate. And meat eating is the biggest part of your climate footprint, if you're a big meat eater. The biggest part of your climate footprint. But what about transportation? Transportation and the food system

are about the same at around 18 to 20%. But it's the hardest for a lot of us to change. Or in some ways, it's the easiest because it's just a different kind of choices. But, you know, you can buy your electric car. You know, you make these big moves. But beef eating in particular has a tremendous impact on the climate. Have you looked at all into these regenerative farms and whether or not they're scalable? Yeah.

The evidence is that they are. It's going to take some work and some different agricultural policies. We have to give farmers incentives, which we already do, of course. Right now, we give them incentives to grow corn and soy. That's it. And they grow a lot of that. And that's the raw material for all the crap we're eating. That gets turned into processed food or it's fed to animals and turned into meat. And that's basically how the food system is organized right now. We could change those incentives and reward farmers instead for practices that sequester carbon and for practices that improve the diet. So even if you added one crop to that corn-soy rotation, you know,

I don't know, pigeon peas or something something like that that are being used to make these meat substitutes it would have a huge positive effect on the soil microbiome on carbon sequestration cover cropping planting trees in your on your farms there's a lot that could be done and that it could make a substantial difference to climate change if we worked on our agriculture one of the weirder things about psychedelic experiences is that different compounds or different types of experiences have different, almost like standard icons or standard narratives. Like one of them is with tryptamines, particularly with ayahuasca, you get a lot of protect nature, protect Mother Earth, some sort of weird connection. And with psychedelic mushrooms, you almost get, there's almost like an announcement that there's an other out there.

Yes, yes, exactly. Right? Yeah. I had that on psilocybin. I had an experience that I described in How to Change Your Mind of being in my garden in Connecticut. And, you know, I've always, I mean, as we've been talking about, I've always given plants a lot of credit, right? For being actors, you know, agents, having their own subjectivity, their own point of view. But it was an intellectual idea. I understood it intellectually. On this psilocybin experience, I was in my garden. It was August. There were dragonflies everywhere and bees everywhere and

birds. And I saw my plants as more alive than I'd ever seen them before. And they were like returning my gaze. And I know that sounds crazy, but they were regarding me as I was regarding them. And I had never felt more part of nature than I did that time. You know, normally as humans, we feel like we've got one foot in nature and one foot definitely out of nature. You know, we even talk about having a relationship to nature. That's fucked up, right? I mean, we're in it. We are nature.

We don't have a relationship to nature. Yeah. But that's how we think. That was all gone. I was just one species among many. And they all had their own subjecthood, their own personalities. And my plants were, you know were really well disposed to me. They were very positive.

There was no negative energies going back and forth. And then the dragonflies were connecting us all. And it was amazing. So it was that kind of announcement you're describing. And a lot of people have nature experiences like that on psilocybin. You're right about ayahuasca too. The imagery is right out of the Amazon, right? And I have a feeling we are bringing that to the experience that jaguars and pythons have been part of like ayahuasca trip reports for a very long time.

But also dragons. Dragons, too. Flying dragons. That's right. Yeah, that one is not – I've never seen those in the Amazon. And also UFOs. Yeah. Like, sometimes people literally see flying saucers and, you know, they get beamed aboard. Yeah, I know.

So it's like how much of it is in your mind. I had a lot of vine imagery on ayahuasca. And that's common too. Yeah. I had this really weird imagery on ayahuasca that stays with me as kind of like this visual koan. And I find one of the things that happens in psychedelic experience is that sometimes there's an image you can take with you and use in your meditation or just when you're just daydreaming. And this is one for me. just daydreaming. And this is one for me. It was a weird ayahuasca circle because it took place during the day because our shaman was losing her sight and wanted to do it during the day.

And so we were wearing eye shades. And I was with a group of women. I was the only man there. And the eye shades they had were really tight. And they were black eye shades with these three bands of black elastic going around my head. And at the height of this experience, I felt like these bars encircling my head, that the things became bars. And then they started reproducing and there were bars going all the way down my body. And I was in this tight little cage and I was like, how am I going to get out of this? And it really was scary. And then I looked down and I see a little bit of green and it's the first two leaves of a vine. And the vine starts climbing up the cage, you know, around and around and around and gets to the top and leaves and,

you know, reaches out to the sun. And I kept saying to myself, plants can't be caged. Plants can't be caged. And I don't know what this means. It may mean nothing at all. But that image, that difference between us and the plants and our limitation and the fact that they can take a cage and use it for their own purposes and reach to the sun and go where they need to go unimpeded was just a powerful image for me.

And it's, you know, sometimes psychedelics just gives you things you chew on. And I've mentioned this in interviews before and people write me with interpretations of, you're actually the vine, you're showing us how to get out of the cage of our, thank you, but I don't know. If people always have their own wacky interpretations of what you're showing us how to get out of the cage of our own. Thank you, but I don't know. People always have their own wacky interpretations

of what you're experiencing. I know, I know. I mean, imagine, like, you know the people that, like, interpret dreams? Yeah. Imagine people that interpret trips. Trips, yeah. Like, that kind of shenanigans, those kind of shysters, they're coming. Yeah, that'll be a job, I guess.

Oh, for sure. Just like psychic healers. And they'll be called integration therapists. Yeah. I mean, there's healers out there. That's what they do. I'm a psychic healer. And that's how they pay their rent, you know, which is just. It's true. Yeah. No, watch out for those charlatans. But I have to say the whole,

I've had a very interesting experience as a writer writing about trips. I mean, it's really risky and hard. And I really was nervous about doing it. I think you've gotten through the net though. Maybe. I think you have. You know, I think I found a way to do it. It was very, it was challenging at first because, you know, we've all read boring trip reports or heard people and hearing people's dreams is like, always puts you to sleep. So I approach those chapters, both in this book and in How to Change Your Mind, with a lot of nervousness. Like, this is a writing challenge I've never met before.

And everybody says these experiences are ineffable, you know, beyond language. But I was going to F them. And, you know, I was going to try. Yeah. Or fail trying. And it turned out to be the most fun I've ever had as a writer, which I didn't expect at all. Once I found the voice and I knew I was writing for people who hadn't tripped as well as for people who had, because I'm trying to reach the general reader. I'm not just writing for psychonauts.

But I found a way to do it, which partly involved acknowledging how insane it sounded. So I would tell an image like that or say something that happened or discovering how important love is and say, look, I know how banal that sounds. But remember, banalities are just truths that have been drained of any kind of emotion from overuse. It doesn't mean they're false.

That's a great way to describe it. And we need to relearn these banalities, right? And psychedelics takes us there. So I would just kind of turn, it was like turning to the audience, right, in a play and say, I know how this sounds to you, but consider. And I do that repeatedly when I'm doing one of these trip reports. And so once I could let go that fear that the reader thought I was absolutely nuts, I could really get into it. And it became sort of like what I imagine novelists get to do, which is essentially transcribe the fantasies in their head without

having to worry about fact checkers or, you know, plausibility. And I was just, I had these memories. And as you know, the memories stay with you for a long time. It's not like dreams in that sense, where dreams are constantly like, you're trying to hold onto it as it flees. But they were still very vivid to me and telling those stories actually became my favorite thing. I mean, in the writing of the book and the mescaline story here that I tell was just, I don't know, it just takes you to a really interesting place as a writer. And, uh, I'm looking forward to more people doing it. I think we will see it. And, you know, I paid no penalty for telling my trip reports in two books so far. Well, I think it's because you establish yourself, again, as a real writer before that.

Or in The Omnivore's Dilemma and all your other books, it's like you're a guy who investigates topics and thoroughly researches them and then gives an accurate and intelligent assessment of what's going on. And they trusted you because of your previous work to apply this same sort of strategy. I think you're probably right. I think I did bring a certain credibility. Had my first book been about psychedelics, I think things would have gone very differently. Yeah. It's funny. The whole time I was working on psychedelics and interviewing all these people in the scientific community, in the underground community, they would say to me, you know, so I think you're going to do for psychedelics what you did for food.

And I'm like, I don't think so. This is a different kind of topic. I thought it was really silly, actually. Really? Before you got involved, you thought it was silly? I didn't imagine the potential for this field to become so legitimate so fast. What year was that? I published that book three years ago.

Well, what year was it when you started thinking about writing? Oh, 2013, 14, I started writing about psychedelics. I did a piece for The New Yorker. And what psychedelic experiences, if any, had you had before that? I had had a couple psilocybin experiences in my 20s. They were not high dose, I now know, having had high dose. They were kind of what people sometimes call museum experiences, where everything just looks kind of filmic or interesting or arty. They were pleasant.

Well, one was pleasant. It was in a rural situation with my wife, and that was wonderful. And then the other was on Riverside Drive in Manhattan. It was like, no, you don't do it there. And that was not pleasant. And then I fell away from it. I had no interest, but I didn't do them in college. It was weird. I went to a college where there was no psychedelics and this is in the seventies. I don't know what I did wrong.

What college? Bennington College in Vermont. And there was like one pothead and everyone else drank. And so it was an odd place that way. And they, there'd been a lot of LSD on campus. I heard years before and then after I was there, but I was in this little window of like no psychedelics. But frankly, I was too afraid. I did not think I was stable enough to take LSD. And I had absorbed all the cultural fear, you know, the stories about your genes and what would happen. And, you know, because this is, I didn't get to college until 1973. So in 1968, when the backlash begins, I'm only 15. So, no, I'm 13. So I brought all this fear. And I didn't think of myself as a stable enough person

to take a chance. And I didn't want to explore my mind. I was afraid of what I'd find there. And, I mean, the mind is a very scary place to go for most of us, I think. But it was particularly scary when I was that age. So I stayed away. I remember writing a short story when I was in 10th grade about a kid who took LSD and broke a bottle and slit his wrist. You wrote a story about this?

Wow. Yeah. So that's what was in my head about it. What was that based on? Just folklore? Yeah, stuff that was out there and fears that I had. So I was coming to it fresh. I didn't really start until I was in my late 50s.

I didn't do it at the age-appropriate time. until I was in my late 50s. I didn't do it at the age-appropriate time. But on the other hand, I came to appreciate that there's a special value to psychedelics late in life. And that I said in How to Change Your Mind that it could be that psychedelics are wasted on the young and that they offer special things to people. When you are not just older but more set in your ways,

you know, when you've developed all these habits, as we get older, we develop these algorithms to get us through any situation, you know, dealing with our kids or our employer. We know what works. We go right to the script. You know, we have a script for everything. But that kind of dulls us to reality. We're not taking in information. We're going right to the solution or the script we want to use. And one of the things I think psychedelics are really good

for is melting those habits and creating a space where new narratives can form. You know, we're the victim of these narratives that our ego tells us, you know, and a lot of them are very critical. You know, you're, you're work shit, you're unworthy, you didn't deserve the success. Our egos are hectoring us with that kind of stuff all the time. Psychedelics tunes that down, sometimes turns it off completely. We know, we know all about the default mode network and the part of the brain where those stories are originating and how they go offline during psilocybin experience or LSD. And then, you know, there is an opportunity once you've softened the hold of those narratives, once you've gotten out of those grooves to start new narratives. And I think that's what happens in many cases. There's a wonderful metaphor that someone I interviewed for the book said. He's a

Dutch neuroscientist. And his image of what psychedelics do is like, imagine a hillside. He would have said a mountain, but he's never seen a mountain. He's in Holland. It's a flat country. Imagine a hillside covered in snow. And imagine your thoughts as sleds going down that hill. Over time, the grooves created by those sleds get deeper and deeper. And over time, it's impossible to go down that hillside without falling into those grooves. They're attractors. They'll just suck you right in. What the psychedelic experience does is it's like a new snowfall, fresh snow, it fills all the grooves, and that allows you

to go down the hill in a new way. That is a beautiful image. That is beautiful. Let's end with that. That's perfect. Sounds good. All right, this book is out July 6th, audio as well?

Audio as well, and Kindle. This is your mind on plants. The great and powerful Michael Pollan. Thanks, Joe. I really, really appreciate that. Great pleasure. It was awesome. I really enjoyed it. You too.

Bye, everybody. Thank you.